Fruitful reading for trend-spotters and entrepreneurs, who will find much grist for their mills.
Demographics and economics meet in this oddly cheering book about the world’s aging population.
Geezers of the world, unite; you’re a member of the baby boom, you’re about to reassert your role as a huge market force. By 2030, writes MIT AgeLab founder and director Coughlin, there will be 1 billion people worldwide who are 65 or older, a number that will rise to 1.6 billion by 2050. “The emerging population of older adults isn’t just big,” he writes. “It’s so enormous, it’s as though a new continent were rising out of the sea, filled with more than a billion air-breathing consumers just begging for products that fulfill their demands.” In the U.S., senior spending and what economists call its downstream effects amounted to about $8 trillion in 2015, $10,000 more per capita in spending than those aged 30 to 44. Advertisers will obviously want to rethink their efforts to capture the younger demographic stratum when so much money is waiting to be claimed at the upper end. Coughlin examines some of the changes that are being wrought in recognition of older consumers, and he identifies a few design challenges to come. For instance, he observes, CVS drugstores began to organize stock to lessen “store-wandering from folks dealing with mobility impairments” by, for example, grouping diabetes-related products together. Inspired by the tennis balls that some seniors put on their walker feet so that they slide more easily, some manufacturers have added plastic skis. Business opportunities ranging from grocery delivery to home care and landscaping are broadening with this rising audience. The author urges younger readers to prepare for impending old age by saving far more than they do (only about 4 in 10 millennials, he writes, save consistently at all), and he concludes that those who have prepared will find that “we are on the cusp of learning to celebrate life in old age—while we’re still alive.”
Fruitful reading for trend-spotters and entrepreneurs, who will find much grist for their mills.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61039-663-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 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.
