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Personally, I think life plus 30 years would be quite fair. 30 years is enough time for any children to grow up, get an education, and be able to support themselves. It's also more than enough time for a surviving spouse to get his/her act together and find his/her own source of income if need be. Existing copyright terms are just plain ridiculous.
Of course, I also think that, by law, all publishing contracts should have a "use it or lose it" clause whereby, if a publishing company lets a book go out of print for longer than, say, five years at most (two would be my personal preference but I'm trying to be reasonable here), the rights would automatically revert to the author who would then be able to get it published elsewhere. Further to that, if the author doesn't make at least a reasonable *attempt* to get the work republished within ten years of it going out of print, that particular work should become public domain. There's no good, defensible reason for keeping out-of-print books locked up in contracts or under copyright law. After all, if they're out-of-print, the author isn't making any money from them (nor is the publisher). And post-publishing author regret/embarrassment really isn't a good enough reason to leave a book out-of-print - once it's been published, it's out in public and it's silly for an author to try to erase all memory of that particular work by keeping it out of print.
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