The notorious baby boomers are approaching the end and starting to plan their final moves in the game of life. 'What was that all about?' they're asking. 'Was it about acquiring things or changing the world? Was it about keeping all your marbles? Or is the only thing that counts after you're gone the reputation you leave behind?' In Old Age: a beginner's guide, Michael Kinsley answers the questions we are all forced to confront sooner or later.

Throughout her career, Judith Viorst has written numerous books reflecting on life as she ages. Now in her nineties, she shares her experiences in life's "final fifth" in this collection of poetry and essays. On her retirement community, she notes that it is "wonderful, marvelous, swell--good as gold. Except for this one little problem: everyone's old." On her late husband (who died of COVID-19 in 2022), she pleads: "I need you fixing our damn circuit breakers. I need you! Could you please stop being dead?" With humor and vulnerability, Viorst invites readers to dance with her between grief and levity and to enjoy the time we have left to share.

We now live longer today than at any time in history. In the UK, more people are aged over sixty-five than under sixteen and by 2050, over a third of the developed world will be over sixty. How should we deal with this phenomenon? What are the scientific reasons for ageing? And can - or should - we prevent it?Lewis Wolpert, distinguished biologist and octogenarian, explores the scientific background and the implications of our ageing population. In this engaging investigation, he tackles every aspect of the subject from ageism to euthanasia to anti-ageing cream and, through it all, tries to better understand his own ageing. Witty, frank and often inspiring, Lewis Wolpert is the perfect guide to looking very well.

Best-selling author Richard Lederer shares, in 14-point type, his wit and wisdom and information and inspiration about the incredible journey of aging. The touching stories, fascinating facts, and rollicking humor will lift your spirit, stimulate your mind, and tickle your funny bone. Jim McLean’s sprightly illustrations help bring The Gift of Age to vibrant life.

Are the elderly posing a threat to America's political system with their enormous clout? Are they stretching resources to the breaking point with their growing demands for care? Distinguished economist and legal scholar Richard A. Posner explodes the myth that the United States could be on the brink of gerontological disaster. Aging and Old Age offers fresh insight into a wide range of social and political issues relating to the elderly, such as health care, crime, social security, and discrimination. From the dread of death to the inordinate law-abidingness of the old, from their loquacity to their penny-pinching, Posner paints a surprisingly rich, revealing, and unsentimental portrait of the millions of elderly people in the United States. He explores issues such as age discrimination in employment, creativity and leadership as functions of age, and the changing social status of the elderly. Why are old people, presumably with less to lose, more unwilling to take risks than young people? Why don't the elderly in the United States command the respect and affection they once did and still do in other countries? How does aging affect driving and criminal records? And how does aging relate to creativity across different careers?

The author of the ground-breaking work, The Feminine Mystique, tackles the meaning of age and aging in contemporary society, for both men and women. 250,000 first printing. BOMC Feat Alt. QPB Split Main. First serial, Time. Tour.

And so you've reached that time in life when you're starting to pick investments over adventure, clean over scenic, comfortable over intense; when, even though in your heart of hearts you're only seventeen, the rest of you is (how did it happen?) forty. The wise and witty lady of It's Hard to Be Hip Over Thirty is here to get you through those forty-ish years with poems that reflect our common shared experience. So let her help you take a look at that decade of sagging kneecaps and college reunions and fantasies of love in the afternoon; at Maoist kids, cholesterol counts, adult-education courses and other atrocities - which somehow just don't hurt so much when you laugh. A marvelous book filled with insight and warmth, How Did I Get to Be 40 ... & Other Atrocities is Judith Viorst at her best.

The Golden Years? You've got to be kidding . . . Part serious, part comic, these words reflect our ambivalence about aging in the twenty-first century. Is it a blessing or a curse? With refreshing candor and characteristic wit, best-selling author Lillian Rubin looks deeply into the issues of our graying nation, the triumph of our new longevity, and the pain, both emotional and physical, that lies right alongside it. Through thought-provoking interviews, research, and unflinching analysis of her own life experience, Dr. Rubin offers us a much-needed road map for the uncharted territory that lies ahead. In a country where 78 million baby boomers are moving into their sixties and economists worry that they are "the monster at the door" that will break the Social Security bank and trash the economy; where 40 percent of sixty-five-year-olds are in the "sandwich generation," taking care of their parents while often still supporting their children; and where Americans eighty-five and older represent the fastest-growing segment of the population, we cannot afford to pretend that our expanded old age is just a walk on the sunny side of the street, that "sixty is the new forty," "eighty is the new sixty," or that we'll all live happily ever after. In this wide-ranging book, Dr. Rubin examines how the new longevity ricochets around our social and emotional lives, affecting us all, for good and ill, from adolescence into senescence. How, she asks, do sixty-somethings fill another twenty, thirty, or more years post retirement without a "useful" identity or obvious purpose? What happens to sex as we move through the decades after sixty? What happens to long-cherished friendships as life takes unexpected turns? What happens when, at seventy, instead of living the life of freedom we've dreamed about, we find ourselves having to take care of Mom and Dad? What happens to the inheritances boomers have come to expect when their parents routinely live into their eighties and beyond and the cost of their care soars? In tackling the subject of aging over a broad swath of the population, cutting across race, class, gender, and physical and cognitive ability, Lillian Rubin gives us a powerful and long-overdue reminder that all of us will be touched by the problems arising from our new longevity. Our best hope is to understand thoroughly the realities we face and to prepare-as individuals and as a society-for a long life from sixty on up.

On Aging, the first of Jean Amery's books after At the Mind's Limits, is a powerful and profound work on the process of aging and the limited but real defenses available to those experiencing the process. Each essay covers a set of issues about growing old. ""Existence and the Passage of Time"" focuses on the way aging makes the old progressively see time as the essence of their existence. ""Stranger to Oneself"" is a meditation on the ways the aging are alienated from themselves. ""The Look of Others"" treats social aging - the realization that it is no longer possible to live according to one's potential or possibilities. ""Not to Understand the World Anymore"" deals with the loss of the ability to understand new developments in the arts and in the changing values of society. The fifth essay, ""To Live with Dying,"" argues that everyone compromises with death in old age (the time in life when we feel the death that is in us). Here Amery's intention, as encapsulated by John D. Barlow, becomes most clear: ""to disturb easy and cheap compromises and to urge his readers to their own individual acts of defiance and acceptance.""

"A brave book with a polemical argument on the paradoxes, struggles and advantages of aging. How old am I? Don't ask, don't tell. As the baby boomers approach their sixth or seventh decade, they are faced with new challenges and questions of politics and identity. In the footsteps of Simone de Beauvoir, Out of Time looks at many of the issues facing the aged--the war of the generations and baby-boomer bashing, the politics of desire, the diminished situation of the older woman, the space on the left for the presence and resistance of the old, the problems of dealing with loss and mortality, and how to find victory in survival"--

The author of The Lonely Guy's Book of Life offers a survival guide for the midlife male, addressing virtually all of his concerns and offering outrageous suggestions on everything from sexual performance anxiety to memory lapses to cars. 35,000 first printing.

A New York Times Bestselling AuthorRiding a bicycle across the United States is one of those bucket-list goals that many dream about but few fulfill. In 2011 at the age of fifty-seven, New York Times obituary writer Bruce Weber made the trip alone and wrote about it as it unfolded mile by mile. Now, expanding upon the articles and blog posts that quickly became a must-read adventure story, Weber gives us a witty, inspiring, and reflective diary of his journey.

Examines the experience of aging from the standpoint of the individual, rather than merely as a collection of statistics and charts. This title looks at aging, emotion and coping, and stability and change in both environment and personality. It is useful for scholars and also accessible to the lay audience.

"From the co-creator of the celebrated Big Book of Jewish Humor comes a laugh-out-loud collection of jokes about growing older that makes fun of memory loss, marriages, medicine, sex, the afterlife, and much more, making this the perfect gift for almost anyone who was born before you were. Growing older can be unsettling and surprising. (How on earth did this happen? Where did the years go?) So what better way to deal with this new stage of life than to laugh about your new reality? Die Laughing includes more than enough jokes (not to mention cartoons!) to let that laughter burst out. Whether it's dealing with doctors, dating in one's seventies, or unexpected bodily changes (not to mention funny noises), some things are easier to face with a smile of recognition. That's why Die Laughing is the perfect gift for your parents, anyone celebrating a significant birthday, or any boomer with a sense of humor whose age begins with a six or higher"--

As a young woman, Carolyn Heilbrun made a resolution not to live past "three score years and ten." Taking her own life at the age of seventy, she reasoned, would lend clean closure to a life well lived, and would keep her from the many tragedies of aging--becoming a burden to her children, witnessing the deterioration of her body, falling prey to a crippling disease. But on the advent of her seventieth birthday, she looked back on the past ten years and found, to her surprise, that her sixties had been the happiest decade of all: after fifty years, her marriage had matured into a happy balance of companionship and respect for solitude; she had developed deep friendships with her grown children and a small circle of peers; she had mastered a highly successful career as a scholar and writer. In the poignant, essayistic writing that best showcases her elegant talent and provocative mind, Carolyn Heilbrun celebrates the many pleasures of a mature life. Filled with wisdom, knowledge, wry humor, and literary allusion, The Last Gift of Time is a moving book for all women invested in the pursuit of leading a woman's life to its fullest capacity.

""Acclaimed author and feisty nonagenarian Hotchner's witty ruminations about the art of living well into old age...with brio and a touch of his trademark sass, Hotchner writes about rediscovering love after 75, finding joy in a scrappy African gray parrot he named after his longtime friend, Ernest Hemingway, and going on his very first safari at age 88." - Kirkus Reviews When youngsters in their seventies and eighties, nervously lurching toward the horizon of ninety, ask me, "What's the secret?" That's what I tell them: "O.J. in the morning, gin and tonic at night." You don't have to be in your seventies or eighties to enjoy A. E. Hotchner's elixir for aging happily, but after reading this charming collection of essays, you may wish you were. Nonagenarian, novelist, playwright, and biographer, Hotchner gives us heartfelt and laugh-out-loud anecdotes that describe his unique reflections on the aging process. His musings cover everything from the outlandish commercials that target the older generation (Viagra, Cialis, and Flomax) to suggestions on adapting the tennis game for seniors (he suggests lowering the net by two inches and moving all outer lines two feet inward) to the advantages of having a pet (his pet parrot often tells guests to "kiss my ass"). He can equally capture the headier side of aging, which is bittersweetly revealed in his piece about divorce. With his disarming, eloquent voice and dry sense of humor, Hotch illuminates life's wisdoms through his optimistic, witty, and romantic outlook, all the while maing you feel, well, not unhappy about growing older. O.J. in the Morning, G&T at Night is a book of courageous advice, humorous wisdom, and, above all, good strategies for how to stay young at heart"--

" "I believe Freud got it wrong when he said that the two basic drives that motivate our thoughts and behavior are 1) sex and 2) death, which he sometimes called aggression, go figure. So what runs the show, then? Fear of embarrassment prevails until the age of thirty, followed by the desire to lose weight, and finally, the need to sit down." In LETS BE LESS STUPID, longtime New Yorker staffer and former SNL writer, Patty Marx, employs the weapon she wields best--razor-sharp humor--to tackle what is perhaps the most difficult facet of aging-the decline of the mind. From losing her keys to forgetting her sister-in-law's name, Marx has done it all, and somehow prevailed with friendships in tact. Unrelentingly funny and unexpectedly candid, LET'S BE LESS STUPID speaks to women and men of a certain age, but it will make you laugh at any age. Filled with anecdotes about trying to learn Cherokee, zapping her brain with electricity, taking pills that make her pay attention, and listening to hours of Mozart--all in the service of keeping her mental faculties intact--this is an utterly fresh and original take from one of the smartest comedic writers today. The first woman to be elected to the Harvard Lampoon, Marx is her generation's Nora Ephron. "--

Every woman who is facing fifty or has already moved past it will be grateful for this warm, witty exploration of the indignities and epiphanies of midlife, large and small. Suddenly waking up in the middle of the night, for instance, with a non-negotiable need to go to the bathroom. Immediately. Having to let the waistband out on every skirt you own. Discovering one day that you can no longer read the phone book. Finally figuring out what you want to be when you grow up. Realizing that not everyone you love will be here forever and neither will you. Cherishing the present as never before.

Does your real age match the age you feel? When do we reach middle age? When, if ever, are we old? The way we age and the way we perceive age has changed radically. As we embrace new experiences, relationships and gadgets, we barely stop to look at our watches let alone consider whether our behaviour is 'age appropriate'. In this provocative and timely book, Catherine Mayer looks at the forces that created amortality - the term she coined to describe the phenomenon of living agelessly. As she follows this social epidemic through generations and across continents, she reveals its profound impact on society, our careers, our families and ourselves. Why be defined by numbers? Are you amortal?