"In this latest of Gullette’s half-dozen books exploring aging and ageism, the Brandeis University scholar continues with her penchant for intriguing titles, such as 2017’s award-winning Ending Ageism: How Not to Shoot Old People, Rutgers University Press. But her satirical tongue isn’t even half way into her cheek with this deadly serious and meticulously researched new volume. In American Eldercide, Gullette documents tens-of-thousands unnecessary fatalities among older Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic. The book amounts to an indictment of greed in the U.S. health care system, and more fundamentally, the ageist attitudes permeating American culture."

Generations Beat Online

"An alarming exposé of the unnecessary, untimely, and largely undocumented deaths of residents in government-supervised nursing homes since the start of the COVID pandemic due to understaffing; deregulation; lack of testing, protective gear, and treatment; vaccination delays; abuse; and neglect. . . . Most moving are the personal stories shared throughout."

Choice

"In the first days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Margaret Morganroth Gullette immediately became concerned about older adults' access to ventilators since a patient's age was the only explicit reason someone could be barred access to those medical devices during a public health emergency. . . . Gullette started writing and researching as a 'passionate protest,' and what emerged was her recently published book American Eldercide. The book includes interviews with COVID survivors, family members who lost loved ones and health experts. It aims to put a name and face to those who were lost."

MarketWatch

"Gullette calls into question the fundamental assumption that older people are closer to death and therefore more easily discarded. The book touches on everything from the shadow of eugenics to toxic masculinity to the selfish over-indulgence of youthful partygoers. . . . This [Eldercide] could have all been prevented, and still can be, she says, with more visibility, more funding, more staffing—in short, more attention to the people we can all hope to become: the elderly."

Cal Alumni Association Magazine

"Gullette’s healthcare analysis through an age-focused lens addresses a critical gap between age studies and health humanities. . . . [American Eldercide] will appeal to scholars in age studies, medical and health humanities, public health advocates, and anyone concerned with dignified aging, government accountability, and learning from the pandemic’s devastating lessons about care."

International Journal of Ageing and Later Life

"Gullette’s work with the Dignity Alliance of Massachusetts also fuels her passion for the proper care of the elderly. . . . Through a creative nonfiction lens that presents data in a comprehensive way and shares stories of the marginalized community affected by this neglect, Gullette’s book is dynamic and shows the impact that is still lingering through the healthcare system in regard to the elderly."

Hometown Weekly

“’The frail elderly.’ That’s become a term of art. ‘Elderly’ became ’frail elderly,’ which became a total merging of the two, as in ‘fraileldery,’ all one word — a homogeneous lump of debilitated people. If you were elderly, you were frail. So, God bless you and keep you though soon you will be gone — the bottom of the arc, the end of your time. So sad, but that’s life. What can you do? . . . Through her interviews with nursing home residents, Gullette shows how inaccurate and disempowering that view is. In fact, people in nursing homes are very different from one another. Some are indeed frail, but many of them, even with the issues that brought them to the facility, are quite independent and resilient. Eldercide lumped old folks together as a homogeneous mass of end-of-lifers, a focus on death rather than life.”

Honolulu Civil Beat

“A masterpiece. Gullette writes with passion, a critical eye, and an often-sly sense of humor. She shows, in devastating detail, how we as a society failed our elderly population—and the lessons we must learn in order to avoid a similar catastrophe in the future.”

Harry Moody, former Vice President for Academic Affairs, AARP

"We won’t have to wait two decades for the definitive book explaining the grim fate of the most vulnerable Americans, the elderly, during the first wave of Covid-19 in 2020 to be acclaimed. American Eldercide is that book. In a tour de force of statistics, history, personal moral outrage, naming names, pointing fingers, blasting government failures and moving case vignettes describing what happened to real people, Gullette provides the right book. I find little in current policy that captures the sharp insights and warnings in American Eldercide. Ageism has not abated; crude, fantastical egoist selfishness is not being exposed as both ungrounded by facts and flat out dangerous to any society.”

Art Caplan, NYU Grossman School of Medicine

“With Gullette’s work leading the way toward combating ageism, a growing coalition of scholars, activists, and academics suggests that change is possible. . . . Gullette’s healthcare analysis through an age-focused lens addresses a critical gap between age studies and the medical humanities. . . [She] shows how COVID-19 both exposed the brutal harm of ageism and created opportunities to align anti-ageism efforts with broader social justice movements.”

International Journal of Ageing and Later Life

“With unflinching detail, American Eldercide indicts government indifference and failed regulation during the COVID pandemic. Poignant portraits of real people bring us face to face with individuals who are all our responsibility. This powerful book should be read by anyone who cares about public health, dignified aging, and government accountability.”

Katherine S. Newman, author of Downhill From Here: Retirement Insecurity in the Age of Inequality

“Unflinching and powerful. Through fierce and evocative prose, Gullette exposes the harsh realities many older adults faced during the COVID-19 pandemic and lays bare the systemic failures and personal tragedies that unfolded. American Eldercide underscores the urgent need to address ageism in our institutions—and ourselves.”

Tracey Gendron, author of Ageism Unmasked

“A remarkable and vivid description of one of the worst chapters in the history of nursing homes—orchestrated by corporate greed and profiteering. It is a wake-up call for the need for total reform or elimination of the institutions where older people are sent to die without dignity or care.”

Charlene Harrington, University of California, San Francisco

“In her incendiary new book, Gullette explains why the deaths of over 150,000 residents of nursing facilities were preventable, laying out the governmental failures and intersecting biases that legitimized their appalling abandonment. Ultimately, she places those lost residents where they rightly belong: at the center of a shared vision of a better future for us all.”

Ashton Applewhite, author of This Chair Rocks

“American Eldercide should stand beside Betty Friedan’s Fountain of Age and Dr. Robert N. Butler’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Why Survive? Being Old in America as essential reading about aging and ageism in the U.S.. Incisively researched and compellingly written, Gullette's riveting volume underscores the vitality and resilience of so many older Americans, especially those too readily dismissed as expendable by our youth-obsessed medical-industrial complex.”

Paul Kleyman, Co-Founder and National Coordinator, Journalists Network on Generations

“The stories and interviews that Gullette presents in this book will grab your attention. Promoting dialogue about the deep ageism in society is vital to making meaningful improvements now, in policy and funding for long-term care settings such as nursing homes.”

Alice Bonner, Senior Advisor for Aging, Institute for Healthcare Improvement

“American Eldercide pulls no punches exposing the greed of uncaring nursing home operators and misfeasance of the bureaucrats failing to protect countless vulnerable residents. It’s a stark warning about the pitfalls of aging, and a wake-up call to work for transformational change to keep us all from sharing the stories of Vera and so many others. Gullette offers a common-sense prescription for what would lead to aging with dignity.”

Richard T. Moore, co-founder of Dignity Alliance and former state legislator

"American Eldercide is a courageous and powerful act of research that demands that readers recognize and reckon with the tacit roots of why so many living in long-term care died of COVID during the pandemic. May it raise your hackles and fuel reform."

Anne Basting, author of Creative Care and MacArthur Fellow