When I was in my twenties, I was a self-confident smarty-pants, a yuppie New Yorker working for a national humor magazine who believed the world was my oyster. My future? Old age was too far off to even think about, of course, but I suppose I imagined myself moving through a succession of gratifying and remunerative jobs, my long and happy career tapering off eventually into a life of comfortable leisure and satisfied self-contemplation.

Well, the joke was on me! In what seemed like the blink of an eye, I found myself nearing the half-century mark in life, unwillingly eased out of employment by a corporate takeover and neither psychologically nor financially prepared for early retirement. Wondering what in the world I was going to do next, I also became aware of a small voice inside my head saying, "What have you really accomplished, anyway — besides earning membership in AARP?"

For baby boomers who find themselves at such a crossroads, whether unexpected or grimly anticipated, Marc Freedman's Encore: Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life attempts to answer that most difficult of questions — now what?

Freedman, a social entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Civic Ventures, argues that reinventing the concept of retirement is essential if we are to address the employment crisis rapidly confronting the aging baby boomer generation — a population whose lives are likely to stretch twenty or thirty years beyond the end of their primary careers. The vision of retirement as an endless vacation, he argues, is neither practical nor appealing given the economic and demographic characteristics of this population.

Beyond the concerns of individual retirees, the book also addresses the economic and social catastrophe that threatens all of America (and the world) as vast numbers of boomers leave the workforce while expecting the much smaller population of working-age adults to pick up the tab. How serious is the problem? According to Freedman, the United Nations has identified global warming, global terrorism, and global aging as "the top three socioeconomic issues of the twenty-first century."

Freedman dons many hats — historian, social critic, visionary — in addressing these problems, and in so doing paints a complex portrait of aging and working in America. In the chapter "Inventing the Golden Years," for example, he describes the evolution of retirement in America from the "gerontocracy" of Puritan times, when old age was actually esteemed, to the nineteenth century, when older workers were summarily discarded in favor of younger, cheaper replacements via mandatory retirement, to the Depression, when as many as two-thirds of older Americans lived in poverty.

Then came Social Security, originally created with the modest goal of protecting older workers from deprivation during the final years of their lives. With life expectancies steadily rising, however, it became increasingly apparent that the program was evolving into an open-ended meal ticket for a population that refused to die on cue. Retirement grew into decades of forced inactivity, producing the first hints of resentment on the part of younger generations who were asked to foot the bill and frustration on the part of retirees with nothing to do.

The concept of retirement changed again in the 1960s with the development of retirement communities such as Sun City and Leisure World and the redefinition of retirement as "the Golden Years," a blissful time of recreation and travel unencumbered by financial worries. It was an almost utopian vision of retirement, one still frequently seen in Sunday morning television commercials extolling the oxymoronic virtues of an "active life of leisure."

Today, however, that vision is collapsing as more and more retirees discover that they aren't wealthy enough to sustain decades of leisure and/or are psychologically unprepared for a lifestyle defined by the golf course, the shopping mall, and the casino. At the same time, the Social Security system is teetering on the brink of insolvency and the American workforce is facing serious shortages in fields such as education, health care, and public service.

For Freedman, the solution to both problems is to replace the traditional notion of retirement with a phased transition from one career to a second, "encore" career. The first phase, a one- or two-year "gap" devoted to the leisure and recreation formerly relegated to traditional retirement, serves as a transition to a second career in which the skills and experience accumulated in the primary career are directed to a new purpose. True retirement, if it occurs at all, takes place considerably later in life, perhaps in one's mid-seventies.

While Freedman does not rule out the business world as a source of encore careers, it is clear that his vision is for boomers to become "the backbone of education, health care, nonprofits, the government, and other sectors essential to national well-being." He convincingly argues not only that boomers are particularly well-suited for these roles given their life experience, but that labor shortages in crucial fields such as teaching and nursing demand intervention from the boomer generation.

To demonstrate that encore careers are already becoming an attractive alternative to traditional retirement, Freedman intersperses his chapters with personal accounts of individuals who have embraced new careers in later life, including a car salesman turned social entrepreneur, a homemaker turned Episcopal priest, and a truant officer turned critical care nurse.

I immediately identified with Ed Speedling, a health care executive turned advocate for the homeless, who like me mistakenly believed that his past job experience would make him irresistible to nonprofits. "The real problem, I thought," says Speedling, "would be how to choose from the many offers I would receive." Well, the joke was on him!

Unfortunately, Goodman warns, good intentions are not enough to ensure a smooth transition to a new career, and boomers must be prepared to face institutional roadblocks from potential employers as well as financial disincentives from the government. He proposes a number of initiatives to address these problems, including national service programs, increased flexibility at the workplace, and the enactment of an Encore Bill, fashioned roughly after the GI Bill, to remove barriers to employment beyond retirement age. The alternative, he believes, is a population of boomers "left at loose ends, underemployed, lacking purpose, [and] feeling diminished and betrayed."

The book is attractively designed by Jenny Dossin, and portraits of the encore careerists are supplied by photographer Alex Harris, lending a sense of intimacy to their stories. An appendix provides an introductory guide to finding encore careers, and further resources (including those all-important URLs) can be found in the endnotes and reading list. It's an impressive if compact package, and if I were to find myself out of work tomorrow, this book would be my first line of attack in finding a new career.

But no need for that, at least not now! It took longer than I had anticipated, but at the Foundation Center this boomer was eventually lucky enough to find the "what" to my "Now what?" no joke. And with the help of books like Encore, others can look forward to doing the same.