An upbeat, empathetic, and practical guide to becoming “an old person in training.”
A satisfying exploration of how growing older offers significant, rich new experiences.
Applewhite (Cutting Loose: Why Women Who End Their Marriages Do So Well, 1997, etc.), cited by Forbes as one of Forty Women to Watch Over 40, in 2017, argues convincingly that ageism—like racism and sexism—is a form of demeaning prejudice, inaccurately generalizing the experiences of older adults and promoting the idea that old age is repulsive and lonely. Drawing on abundant studies and interviews, she exhorts readers “to wake up to the ageism in and around us, embrace a more nuanced and accurate view of growing older, cheer up, and push back.” Stereotypes of old age—geezer, biddy, codger, etc.—convey negativity. “Those stereotypes,” she writes, “are ours to reject or subvert on the way to more compelling and accurate aspirational identities.” But rejecting such stereotypes should not lead to strategies such as dying hair, applying creams and potions, and taking pills that promise “to erase the trace of time.” Applewhite debunks many prevalent assumptions about aging, including failing memory, weakened physical ability, and overall lack of attractiveness and competence. She notes that forgetfulness “is not Alzheimer’s, or dementia, or even necessarily a sign of cognitive impairment”; rates of dementia are falling, she has discovered, even as the population is aging. Moreover, especially “in the emotional realm, older brains are more resilient,” better able to deal with negative emotions and change. Everyone ages at a different rate, she writes: “There is no line in the sand, no crossover between young and old after which it’s all downhill.” Viewing 60 or 70—or even 40—as the beginning of the end necessarily has an impact on self-image and outlook. Among the author’s suggestions for creating “an all-age-friendly world” are creating increased opportunities for older people to contribute “socially, civically, and economically” to the community; improving research into the biology of aging and the social implications of longevity; and expanding the training of geriatric medical practitioners as well as resources for older learners and workers.
An upbeat, empathetic, and practical guide to becoming “an old person in training.”Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31148-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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