[eweissenbach]

by Judith Trolander. Just finished reading this book - took me three or four weeks because I would read 50 pages or so, then put it down and not find myself motivated to pick it back up for several days or a week. The author is a professor at Minnesota-Duluth, and it is a scholarly, very well researched piece as you might expect. She credits Del Webb and Ross Cortese in the early sixties with the pioneering of the "active retirement community" we know today. It is not an easy read IMO, and the author repeats herself so often as to make it distracting. It has more information than the average person would really care to know, and keeps repeating it. She quotes Andrew Blechman, author of "Leasureville" liberally, as there have apparently been relatively few books written on the subject. While her book is very thorough, it has very few human interest stories, I found it rather boring and hard to read. Having read this, and Leasureville, I found Leasureville to be the more entertaining and well written, since it was authored by a professional journalist, as opposed to an academic, though some of Blechman's conclusions were flawed and his stories a bit contrived. Just one persons opinion.