OUR AUTUMN YEARS

A generously illustrated look at old age.

Hartz continues his series of books, including Inconvenient Truths About Relationships (2019), which provide readers with friendly, jovial ruminations on aspects of everyday life. This slim volume looks at the joys, frustrations, and puckish humor of growing old. The author uses the talents of returning artists Jovic, Wolfe, and Ramos to explore various facets of old age, such as “Life With an Old Brain,” “Doctors and Illness,” “Old Versus Young,” and even “At the End.” Hartz makes the wise decision to get out of the way of the art; his narration is appealingly minimal, although memorable. The many black-and-white line drawings are occasionally supplemented with that narration (presented on dramatic, stylized scrolls to underscore the book’s ruling ethos of asking readers to lighten up a bit), and it ranges from the pointed (“We don’t give credit to those skilled at dying. We don’t even notice them”) to the philosophical (“The waking state and the sleeping state fuse with age”) to the wryly humorous (“The computer substitutes nonsense words for the ones I wrote”). The characters’ one-liners in the cartoons are delightful; one cruise-ship shuffleboard player says to another, “I stay young by studying my own diseases,” for example, and an old woman with back pain looks at her dropped purse and says, “What gets on the floor, stays on the floor.” As the inclusion of a chapter on facing the end of life indicates, Hartz refuses to sugarcoat his subject; he shows old age’s frustrations and fears as directly as he shows the happiness that one may experience with the proper mental attitude. However, older readers, or those living with older people, will appreciate the fact that the happiness wins out. Overall, this is a wonderfully hopeful book—empathetic and warmhearted.

An often upbeat set of spirited senior reflections.