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
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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