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HOW TO LIVE FOREVER

THE ENDURING POWER OF CONNECTING THE GENERATIONS

A book that grabs us by the shoulders, turns us toward an important issue, and grips us until we truly see and understand.

A veteran advocate for mixing rather than segregating the generations returns with a volume whose title is hyperbolic but whose subtitle tells the story.

Social entrepreneur Freedman (The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife, 2011, etc.) writes that he’s “never much trusted self-help books or advice,” but he’s written one of the former and dispenses plenty of the latter. Regardless, the author’s principal point is important: The warehousing of our elderly, the establishment of elder-only communities all over the Southwest and elsewhere—these are turning out to be grievous wounds that we are inflicting upon ourselves. Their existence and proliferation deny the young easy access to the experience and wisdom of their elders, and they also deny (or make difficult) opportunities for older Americans to employ the skills—social, intellectual, emotional—that so many of them possess, skills that could have great social benefit. One of the strengths of the book is Freedman’s use of specifics: He tells stories about people who are doing what he advocates, communities that are working to mix the old and the young, and programs that he thinks are hopeful, including his own Generation to Generation, part of his organization encore.org. He also celebrates some individuals who have had an enduring effect on his own thinking and life, most notably the late John W. Gardner, the author of such classics as Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too? (1961), a man whom Freedman revered and who, the author tells us, once said that Freedman was like the son he never had. The author’s tone is enthusiastic and hopeful throughout, but the diction is occasionally clichéd (“the road hasn’t been entirely smooth”). Nonetheless, his enthusiasm is infectious and affecting, and his agenda bristles with sincerity and significance.

A book that grabs us by the shoulders, turns us toward an important issue, and grips us until we truly see and understand.

Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5417-6781-2

Page Count: 224

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969

ISBN: 0375507892

Page Count: 235

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969

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