As spare and elegant as her highly praised short novels Light and Waking , Eva Figes's Ghosts captures the experience of aging. In prose that seems to measure the very beat of passing time, we follow her heroine, an unnamed woman, through four seasons of a single year and watch her come to terms with her former lover, her grown children, and, finally, the ghostly self that she is slowly becoming. She moves through streets that have changed their contours, landscapes in constant flux, in a body slowly turning into her mother's.As her character poignantly lets go of possessions, memories, and all that she holds dear, Figes turns the ordinary occurrences of daily life – eating breakfast, having tea, weeding a garden – into luminous events through the clarity and beauty of her writing.

Elias Canetti, winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature, here offers a quintessential selection from the wealth of his short writings. Remarkable for their uncommon candor and originality, these flashes of thought illuminate a half century of Canetti's existential and intellectual development. By turns enigmatic and profound, anguished and humorous, Canetti's concentrated reflections reveal his grand themes - the mystery of love, the meaninglessness of history, the ambiguity of language, the problem of power, mankind's savagery toward other living creatures. Canetti's hatred of dogma, his passionate protest against aging and death stand out with unparalleled clarity, as does the deep ethical awareness at the core of his creativity.

After the Fall refers to the twin towers, and is Field's ode to the events that transpired thereafter--the war in Iraq and the attack on civil rights in America--as well as his own personal struggles over the indignities of aging. --Publisher's description.

The character of a person, and the worth of a poet, may be judged by how he or she comes to terms with death. David Ignatow, not in his late 70s, faces the prospect of death squarely and speaks with quiet authority of his puzzlement, anger, grief, and ultimate acceptance. In 66 short poems, that together form one monumental work, Ignatow describes what it is to grow old--the isolation, loss of loved ones, idle hours, long walks --and ponders the elemental conundrum of ceasing to exist: "Why was I born if I have to die,/ buzzed the fly, and buzzed and buzzed." He demonstrates his greatness as a poet when he moves beyond somberness to turn the awe of death into a heightened awareness of life and a force that clarifies how we should spend our brief time on this earth. Divided into three sections, Ignatow's conversational meditations are at first ironic and humorous as he addresses "you fool of a cosmos." He then becomes more personal, considering what his dead parents would think of him as a white-haired old man, recalling the "silent company" of the last years with his aging wife, realizing that "it is death to be alone." Ultimately, he finds solace in the natural world--the sound of rain, smell of grass, warmth of sunshine. Without becoming sentimental or mystical, he sees that death is much the glory and handiwork of god (if there be one) as are the mountains and the flowers, which will also die. The poet turns from self-absorption, sadness and regret to see death's power as a reflection of life's wonder: "I look/ out upon the dark, knowing/ death as one form/ of transcendence, but/ so is life."

Preface / S. Dillon Ripley -- Foreword / Wilton S. Dillon -- Introduction / Allan J. Lichtman -- Essays on the Family -- Lessons from Nature? Monogamy among Humans and Other Mammals / Devra G. Kleiman -- The First Americans: Migrations to a New World / T. Dale Stewart -- Continuity across Generations: The Adams Family Myth / David F. Musto -- The Depression Experience in Mens Lives / Glen H. Elder, Jr. and Richard C. Rockwell -- Changing Risks, Changing Adaptations: American Families in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries / John Modell -- Aging Patterns in Black Families / Jacquelyne Johnson Jackson and Bertram Emmanuel Walls -- Kinship, Community, and Locality in American Culture / David M. Schneider -- The Making of a Community: The Role of Women in an Agricultural Setting / Seena B. Kohl -- Caring for the Insane in Ante-Bellum Massachusetts: Family, Community, and State Participation / Barbara G. Rosenkrantz and Maris A Vinovskis -- Roots of the American Family: From Noah to Now / Francis L.K. Hsu -- Workshops and Colloquia -- Family Photo Interpretations (Participants: Joan R. Challinor, Jonathan Garlock, Judith Mara Gutman, Amy Kotkin, Catherine Hanf Noren, Amalie Rothschild, Jamil Simon, William Stapp, Elisabeth Weis) -- Collecting Oral History (Participants: Robert Byington, E. Culpepper Clark, Susan Kalcik, Robert McCarl, Beverly Robinson, Ralph Rinzler, Steven Zeitlin) -- Family Documents (Participants: Allen F. Davis, Richard S. Lackey, Bill R. Linder, Sylvia Wright Mitarachi, James Walker) -- Whither Families? (Participants: Wilton S. Dillon, Jared Hoffman, Francis L.K. Hsu, A. Sidney Johnson III, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Margaret Mead) -- Epilogue / Joan R. Chandler.

Born in the United States, Shirley Kaufman has lived for the past 20 years in Jerusalem, a city split by cultural and religious fault lines. In direct, sensitive language, Kaufman's poems occupy the shifting border between ordinary life and violence, Palestinian and Jew, young love and aging companionship. They grapple with the meaning of routine, of family, and of life among a daily existence punctured with bombs. Sometimes I need to be nowhere. A place without history. "Kaufman's poems flourish in the spaces between what is familiar and unfamiliar, between life in Israel and life in the U.S., and in those moments when the differences between Palestinians and Jews, mothers and daughters, history and the immediate moment play themselves out." -- American Book Review "Kaufman is adept at revealing the human face behind politics, carefully accumulating familiar details to make a large portrait." -- Publishers Weekly Shirley Kaufman is the author of seven books of poetry and several translations from the Hebrew. Her awards include the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award. A native of Seattle, Kaufman now lives in Jerusalem.

In this illuminating philosophical book, Jabes, who died in 1991 and lived in France after being forced to leave Egypt with other native-born Jews during the Suez War, ruminates on the link between being Jewish and being mislabeled as a foreigner. It is also an indictment of bigotry. Jabes writes, "the basic racist is the man who refuses himself as he is. . . . The antisemite can never forgive the Jews for being capable of self-realization . . . . " Elsewhere he observes in verse on his own experience of exile: "I left a land not mine / for another, not mine either. / I took refuge in a word of ink with the book for space, / word from nowhere, obscure word of the desert. " His seamless style brings to mind both religious and French existential writings, although some musings reach heights too abstract to follow: "We must from now on grant citizen's rights to the foreigner's new name: the foreign I . / Foreign Me, foreign You designated by the I. " Here, too, Jabes ( The Book of Questions ) evokes powerful images of the desert to underscore a mood of isolation and comments wisely about aging and power. --

Poetry. Jewish Studies. "Marc Kaminsky's A CLEFT IN THE ROCK is a monumental achievement. At home in no world, Kaminsky has an uncanny gift for walking between worlds, traveling like a courier from the personal to the archetypal. I know of no poet whose work, passionate and visceral, inscribes itself so readily in typological time, the perpetual present of Biblical story, psalm, and creation myth. Meticulously grounded--in Yiddishkeit, the maelstrom of the family, wholehearted married love, the struggles of the aging body--these poems open onto absolutes. The chords they strike have extraordinary resonance: a dying father and Moses' encounter with God, a hospital procedure and an interrogation site. Kaminsky visits the depths to find how to 'live / with catastrophe in the world / of signs and wonders.' His book is itself a cleft in the rock, a site of hard-won emotional possibility in a stone-hearted age. These are poems of naked vulnerability and contingency; they remind us what it means to be whole and human."--D. Nurkse

Book is unmarked and unlined. It only shows very slight aging around the spine and back cover. Overall the book could hardly be in better condition given its age.

Incandescent poems about living and aging—about being awake in this young century—by one of our most moving and eloquent poets. These poems chart the journeys of sleepless nights when whole lifetimes seem to pass with their stories: loves lost and gained; children and seasons in their phases; and the world beyond, both threatening and enriching life. The time before sleep acts as an invitation to reflect on the world's quieter movements—from gardens heavy after a first storm to the moon slipping into darkness in an eclipse—as well as on the subtle but relentless passage of time. Insomnia embodies Linda Pastan's graceful and iconic voice, both lucid and haunting.

Delightfully quirky and willing to go where few other novels dare, The Swift Seasons takes readers deep into the lives of octogenarians in a retirement community as they learn to live with themselves and each other. At the heart of the story is Willa Warsaw, a childless and recent widow in her eighties who spends her days poring over the writing of Oliver Wendell Holmes and daydreaming. Naturally shy and a bit reclusive, Willa finds herself unaccountably drawn to the newest member of the community-former opera singer Eric Ravelle. Eric and Willa connect over their shared voice disorders, finding comfort in each other. But as their relationship deepens over the passing days, so do their health issues, bringing up very real concerns about their future together. Full of memorable characters, sharp insights into aging, and the wisdom of Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Swift Seasons is a treasured gift, a celebration of living long enough to grow old, and a meditation on things that endure or change as we age.

Presents a collection of poems that focus on the themes of aging, loss, and death.

Imperfect Paradise , published in 1988, is Linda Pastan's 4th collection and was a nominee for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Poems deal with birds, the past, children, beauty, rituals, myths, the moon, vacations, aging, death, family life, and hope.

The lives of a cantankerous soap opera star and his makeup artist collide with the those of his biggest fan and her father with the discovery of a piece of fan mail that changes everything -- though perhaps not in the ways they once expected. A charming and witty play about aging and human connection from Winnie Holzman, writer of the hit Broadway musical Wicked and TV's My So-Called Life, and Second City alum Paul Dooley.

For many years scholars have been aware that Michelangelo included his own image in his art. In this study, Edith Balas discusses two previously unrecognized double self-portraits. The earliest of these, a statue known as the Victory, was a private project in which an aging Michelangelo of depicted himself surmounted by an idealized alter ego, a figure associated with his younger self, his beloved friend Tommaso Cavalieri, and the David and Goliath theme that preoccupied him through much of his career. In the second of these double self-portraits, The Conversion of Paul in the Pauline Chapel of the Vatican, the artist, again portraying himself in youth and old age, used a central event in sacred history to make a statement about his own spiritual transformation from Neoplatonist "paganism" to a more orthodox form of Christian piety. Dr. Balas carefully explores the meaning of both works with reference to Michelangelo's life, art and poetry, and reveals them to be among the profoundest autobiographical statements in the history of Western art.