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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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