"If we continue, we grow old, and this is how it could be for us," writes Renee Rose Shield in her candid and sympathetic account of life in one American nursing home. Drawing on anthropological methods and theory to illuminate institutional life, she probes the sources of the profound sense of unease she found at the place she calls "The Franklin Nursing Home."

For fourteen months Shield participated in life at a nursing home in the northeastern United States. She got to know many of the people associated with the home doctors, nurses, custodians, kitchen workers, administrators,...