An uneven but ultimately satisfying examination of the importance of “long years of good health, not long years simply...
A short book about aging and baby boomers that mixes memoir and self-help.
One of the highest-profile journalists in America before he made his diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease public, Vanity Fair columnist Kinsley (Please Don’t Remain Calm: Provocations and Commentaries, 2008, etc.) feels that he has a head start on the rest of his boomer generation on the challenges that aging brings: “Sometimes I feel like a scout from my generation, sent out ahead to experience in my fifties what even the healthiest boomers are going to experience in their sixties, seventies, or eighties…what I have, at the level I have it, is an interesting foretaste of our shared future—a beginner’s guide to old age.” With a slowly progressing form of the disease, the author still has his wits about him, as this droll, engaging, often self-deprecating confessional attests, but he knows that others treat him differently and that his career has plateaued before it once might have peaked. He takes the long view on some big questions concerning “the age of competitive longevity”—is the goal to live longest? To die when you still have most of your marbles? To leave the best legacy and be remembered longest? He suggests “death before dementia” as a rallying cry: “It is also your best strategy, at the moment, because there’s no cure for either one.” Most of the chapters were originally published in different forms in national magazines and don’t always cohere. The last is the one that fits least, focusing on how the boomers as a whole can counter the narrative that has them squandering the legacy of their Greatest Generation parents by paying down the national debt. As the author recognizes, “besides the tsunami of dementia heading our way, there is going to be a tsunami of books about health issues by every boomer journalist who has any, which ultimately will be all of them.”
An uneven but ultimately satisfying examination of the importance of “long years of good health, not long years simply breathing in and out.”Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90376-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Tim Duggan Books/Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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