A warmly reassuring primer on environments that foster graceful aging.
Your house needs to change along with your lifestyle as your body declines, according to this insightful guide to age-supportive environments.
Chiang, an occupational therapist and founder of Evolving Homes, argues that our surroundings, habits, and technology must adapt to the physical and mental impairments that come with aging. Much of the book explores home remodeling ideas, like widening doorways to facilitate wheelchairs, eliminating unnecessary steps, rugs, and other tripping hazards, vetting furniture—glass coffee tables are a low-visibility stumbling menace—and installing high-tech doors that open automatically for residents. The author tours a workshop of new gadgetry, including smart faucets that can be verbally ordered to measure out six ounces of hot water and electrically powered pants that help with a hike in the hills. Fitness is a must for warding off illness and debility, she reminds readers, and she suggests a number of simple sit-and-stand and arm-raising exercises to get moving, along with tips on crafting easy-to-remember routines for preparing meals, taking meds, and staying hydrated. Other chapters cover the special needs of Parkinson’s patients and the reluctance of some to make necessary accommodations like installing bathroom grab bars, which many regard as the Grim Reaper’s calling card. (Chiang suggests calling them “reassurance rails.”) The author’s discussion of these issues is comprehensive, lucid and detailed, and she includes easy-to-use checklists for readers to use when planning household revamps, along with lists of resources and companies who help with transitions. The book is also a fascinating disquisition on how we interact with our homes in ways that have profound consequences that we rarely think about, conveyed in vivid prose that’s informed by subtle, telling observations. (“The oversized armchair completely swallowed this tiny woman,” she writes of one client. “Not only did it put her in poor posture, but she also had to use momentum to stand up every single time—a major fall risk.”) Seniors and their families will find here a splendid blueprint for planning a more comfortable and fulfilling retirement.
A warmly reassuring primer on environments that foster graceful aging.Pub Date: July 4, 2025
ISBN: 9798991043632
Page Count: 363
Publisher: Full Circle Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
