A straightforward and sometimes humorous analysis of the pros and cons of old age.
The 88-year-old author offers an honest take on what old age is really like.
In her latest, anthropologist Thomas (The Hidden Life of Life: A Walk Through the Reaches of Time, 2018, etc.) turns her curiosity about all things natural toward a subject that many choose to ignore, willfully or not: “Why write a book about old age? Nobody wants it. Nobody likes it.” However, she writes, “the aging process is an essential part of the human story, and it’s not for the faint-hearted. It’s as strange as it is captivating—a venture to the unknown.” In a plainspoken narrative, the author covers a variety of topics, including gravesites and cemeteries, the pros and cons of cremation and burial, the physical changes her body has gone through during her long life, independent living, assisted living, home health aides, and the benefits and pitfalls of living alone, as Thomas does on a farm in New Hampshire. The author encourages everyone, old and young, to properly prepare for death and to leave your final wishes in written form so they can be carried out efficiently. With each age-related topic, Thomas writes candidly and with occasional dark humor, sharing both the good and the bad, which includes such expected ills as memory loss and the slow decline of her physical abilities. Given her experiences, the author is insightful—if not groundbreaking—on most topics. In some of her more meandering prose, Thomas shares snippets of information about her previous adventures, which might lead readers to search out her other books. In this one, the author provides readable, forthright discussions of aging that will resonate most with older readers. Though not earth-shattering in any way, the narrative shows all readers that “death is the price we pay for life.”
A straightforward and sometimes humorous analysis of the pros and cons of old age.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-295643-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
