"There's an entirely new way to think about what you do later in life. The third act profiles sixty people who are doing it differently. From names you'll know to those you'll discover for the first time, these life stories and beautiful photographic portraits encourage you to bring your passion and capabilities to redefine and reframe the conventional idea of retirement. Read how well-known celebrities like Alan Alda, Rita Moreno, Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda, James E. Clyburn, Robert Redford, and Norman Lear took on new challenges at an age when some people choose to slow down. Be inspired by the stories of lesser-known figures like Donzella Washington, who became the oldest graduate of Alabama A&M University at eighty; Andrea Peterson, who fulfilled a lifelong dream of becoming a firefighter at fifty; Paul Dillon, who started an incubator for marine veterans after his business career; Hope Harley, who founded the Bronx Children's Museum after a career at telecommunications company; and many more"--Back cover.

Russian-speaking Jews from the former Soviet Union are a peculiarity in the Jewish world. After decades living in a repressive, nominally atheistic state, these Jews did manage to retain a strong sense of Jewish identity - but one that was almost completely divorced from Judaism. Today, more than ten percent of Jews speak or understand Russian, signaling the importance of an ever-vexing question: why are Russian Jews the way they are? In pursuit of an answer, Anna Shternshis's groundbreaking When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life under Stalin draws on nearly 500 oral history interviews on the Soviet Jewish experience with Soviet citizens who were adults by the 1940s. Soviet Jews lived through tumultuous times: the Great Terror, World War II, the anti-Semitic policies of the postwar period, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But, like millions of other Soviet citizens, they married, raised children, and built careers, pursuing life as best they could in a profoundly hostile environment. One of the first scholars to record and analyze oral testimonies of Soviet Jews, Shternshis unearths heartbreaking, deeply poignant, and often funny stories of the everyday choices Jews were forced to navigate as a repressed minority living in a totalitarian regime. Shternshis reveals how ethnicity rapidly transformed into a disability, as well as a negative characteristic, for Soviet Jews in the postwar period, and shows how it was something they needed desperately to overcome in order to succeed. That sense of self has persisted well into the twenty-first century, and has impacted the Jewish identities of the children and grandchildren of Shternshis's subjects, the foundational generation of contemporary Russian Jewish culture. An illuminating work of social and cultural history, When Sonia Met Boris traces the fascinating contours of contemporary Russian Jewish identity back to their very roots.