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SPRING CHICKEN

STAY YOUNG FOREVER (OR DIE TRYING)

Gifford skillfully navigates the many strands of aging research to create an entertaining narrative of the perils of getting...

Examination of the science behind humanity’s obsession with aging and staving off death.

The oldest recorded person was Madame Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 at the age of 122. She was not exactly an exemplar of good health either; she smoked until she was 117. By contrast, the oldest clam was 507. Can humans learn something about aging from clams? Is it possible to plan for a long life? Those are only some of the questions Outside correspondent Gifford (Ledyard: In Search of the First American Explorer, 2007) tackles in his exploration of not only the health industry’s advancements—e.g., controversial hormone therapies—to prolong life expectancy and reduce the effects of aging, but also the cultural perspectives that underscore the evolutionary drive to live as long and comfortably as possible. The author points out the underlying contradiction that while life expectancy has climbed significantly in recent years, the overall health of the population is getting worse. This conundrum cannot easily be answered, but the ethical quandaries related to these medical advances lead to an alternative argument that there is simply no limit to human life. One particularly fringe idea is parabiosis, or surgically pairing a young body to an old one, thereby “distributing” the youth. Gifford chronicles other seemingly sci-fi techniques that are striving for legitimacy and expertly explains complex science in layman’s terms. He also analyzes studies of Alzheimer’s and other disorders and diseases that cause significant cognitive decline. Perplexing still is the fact that people age differently, and there is no predictor why some people live to be 100 in great physical and mental health while others suffer severe debilities at relatively younger ages. The only reasonable prescription for living a long and healthy life is, somewhat anticlimactically, simply exercising and eating right.

Gifford skillfully navigates the many strands of aging research to create an entertaining narrative of the perils of getting old.

Pub Date: March 17, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-4555-2744-1

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.

Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.

Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015

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