Tag Archives: aging
** 1/2 A Bittersweet Season by Jane Gross
A Bittersweet Season is a rather messily organized book, with frequent repeats, and about a depressing topic: how to take care of aging relatives. Moreover, it’s articulated around the author’s personal experience, which is often a recipe for disaster. And … Continue reading
Filed under Non fiction
** Never Say Die by Susan Jacoby
What makes a good rant? One that’s funny, yet biting. One that illuminates a subject that we may not think about every day. One that precipitates action, if warranted. Never Say Die is essentially a 300-page rant about how Americans … Continue reading
Filed under Non fiction
** How We Age by Marc Agronin
I thought that How We Age would describe how our bodies and minds change with age, and to some extent it does, but the author, who works as a psychiatrist in a nursing home, understandably focuses on the confused and … Continue reading
Filed under New fiction
The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain by Barbara Strauch
It turns out that the “grown up” of the title in The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain is really the middle-aged, that is, us, and that our brains are working wonderfully well. What a feel-good book! It turns out … Continue reading
Filed under Non fiction
The Thing about Life is that One Day You Will Be Dead by David Shields
The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead is a hard book to classify: is it a precis about how the body ages? Yes. Is it a memoir of the author’s and his dad’s aging? Yes. Is … Continue reading
Filed under Non fiction
Deaf Sentence by David Lodge
By the always funny and understated David Lodge, Deaf Sentence starts out as a simple, perhaps superficial story about middle-aged deafness with hilarious observations about the indignities of miscommunications but veers into the heartbreak of helping aging parents, balanced by the … Continue reading
Filed under New fiction
How to Live by Henry Alford
How to Live claims to chronicle a search for wisdom from old people (while they are still on this earth.) And indeed, it does. Chronicle the search, that is, which consists of the minutiae of arranging interviews interspersed with not very … Continue reading
Filed under Non fiction
Mrs. Astor Regrets by Meryl Gordon
The rich are not like us. For starters, they have several “residences” (nothing as gauche as houses or apartments) in wonderful locales in which they alternate depending on the season — although they also rent other luxurious residences when needed, … Continue reading
Filed under True story
No More Words by Reeve Lindbergh
I picked up this book because I liked Forward From Here and I was disappointed. Like Forward from Here, this is a journal-like description of the author’s life but the topic is different; here she focuses on the final months … Continue reading
Filed under True story
Mothering Mother by Carol O’Dell
A true story of a daughter taking care of her aging and increasingly debilitated mother while raising three daughters of her own, keeping house, and escaping to college at night. I happened to read Mothering Mother right after To die well : … Continue reading
Filed under True story
