New Times, New Challenges: Law and Advice for Savvy Seniors and Their Families

If your parents are growing older, if you are growing older (or at least you hope to), you will face new times and new challenges. This book will help. A law professor and a leading elder law lawyer team up to offer legal and practical advice on retirement issues (finances, housing, health care), walk you through various estate planning options (living trusts, wills, advance directives), and help your family in truly sad times, disability and death in the family. They also help you avoid, and, if that's too late, deal with bad folks: caretakers who abuse elders, obnoxious bill collectors, scam artists, identity thieves, and those discriminate on the basis of age or disability. Alas, there are even legal problems associated with grandparenting and remarriage (the triumph of hope over experience).

As to driving and sex, while there is both good and bad news, one message stands out: never at the same time.

The topics may be sobering, but the style is not. It's a good read, often funny and even, on occasion, profound. Charles Sabatino, the director of the American Bar Association's Commission on Law and Aging, writes that the book is ''an encyclopedic legal reference with the down-home philosophy and wit of Will Rogers, wryly enriched by poetry, humor, and existential musings.'' Doctor Andrew Weil finds the book ''entertaining and uplifting with very practical and sensible suggestions.'' He will use it himself and will recommend it to patients, friends, and loved ones.

Whether you buy this book or not, the time is now to face the new challenges that are hurrying near. How? Sit down for an hour and write a letter to your family, covering such things as end-of-life care, living arrangements in the case of disability, and who gets the grandfather clock. (There is a suggested model in the book.) Discuss your letter with loved ones. You will save you and your family, money, confusion, and heartbreak. Challenges, unaddressed, fester.

Professor Hegland has spent his career teaching law, mostly at Arizona but also UCLA and Harvard. He has degrees from Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Harvard. Author of several legal books, he is known for his wit and clarity. Robert Fleming has spent his career practicing elder law. He lectures nationally and authors a legal treatise used by many of the nation's elder law lawyers.

They know their stuff. And now you can too.