An entertaining look at older romance that should encourage baby boomers to get out there and mingle.
How and why older couples have searched for and found new loves.
Using details from her own late-in-life love story and those of 14 other couples, Pell (We Used to Own the Bronx: Memories of a Former Debutante, 2010) explores why couples in their 60s, 70s, 80s and even 90s have reached out and found new companionship and romance. Pell poses a series of questions that are answered in revolving snippets from each couple’s perspective; the responses help explain why the graying population of America is embracing another chance at happiness. Whether they’ve met online, where the fastest growing dating demographic is individuals over the age of 60, through mutual friends, or rekindled an old love interest from high school, these couples have all decided that the joy, companionship and physical contact are benefits that outweigh any negatives. Many found their adult children were not supportive at first, as they didn’t understand the need for company after successful relationships of 40-50 years or more. Other couples faced serious health issues that cut short their time together, but all agreed none would skip the experience even if they knew the outcome in advance. Some overcame the dilemma of living in separate houses, filled with years of accumulated stuff, or of living in two different parts of the country. “What has astonished me is the intensity and passion that old people can experience,” writes Pell, “as well as the depth, feeling, and resourcefulness in working out ways of relating, whether living together or apart, married or unmarried….I know from my own experience that people once written off as too old for romance—most notably by family—can transcend such stereotypes and engage in mad love affairs.” Readers old and young can take heart knowing that love doesn’t fade just because one grows old.
An entertaining look at older romance that should encourage baby boomers to get out there and mingle.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0804176460
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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