The brain is a lonely hunter
Life Lessons from a Brain Surgeon : the new science and stories of the brain Dr Rahul Jandial (more…)
Extra Time : 10 Lessons for An Ageing World / Camilla Cavendish
The parade of celebrity dust-cover reviewers clearly saw something in Extra Time which I missed. For by page 132 the book was being slammed shut while cool was recovered. The author had been meeting one Professor Leonard P. Guarente of MIT. And then the poor reader gets this: “Does he look 64? It’s hard to tell. Balding, but spry (sic), in a check shirt and faded jeans, kind eyes twinkling owlishly (sic) behind rimless spectacles, he could be younger or older (sic)”. Nobody should be asked to pay for journalese so inert and so pointless. Extra Time is jammed with the kind of observational banality so popular in American non-fiction that it should be the object of serious import restrictions. Even more tellingly, the book does not really have a…
A lot of knowledge is a dangerous thing : or how wisdom can age…
Heavens above! One just does not know where to start. This is a book so badly conceived, written and edited that it should never have made it out of pulp. All the distinguished persons whose applause rings through the promotional blurb - some favourably name-checked in the text - should consider their position as celebrities and opinion-leaders. On the Future rises not very far above vanity-publishing. All copies should be bundled and shot back to the Big Bang. Proof? Shame on the people at PUP for letting pass into hardback a work with so many disembodied sentences, devoid of self-awareness, as dull as dark matter. Here is a sample (drawn from the dozens available) - coming not from someone passing through a writing-course novitiate but a Cambridge don and the…
Aging : not for kids and not for hippies
Our new 21st century Third Age is calling forth so many semi-scholarly books which cannot decide whether their goal is to achieve dispassionate social analysis or to offer superior self-help guidance. So it is with The Happiness Curve. From whatever perspective, this is not good karma. But firstly a thought experiment... Imagine you are 75 years of age this very day. Coincidentally contacted by a respectable research agency, you are invited to rate your general level of personal happiness / life satisfaction on a scale of 1-10 (where 10 would equal totally blissed-out). You agree to participate. But a silent inhibition tugs at your guts. “If I say that I am, in fact, dreadfully unhappy, will the whole world know that my whole life has ipso facto been a failure?…
Revolt is not time’s fool.
This book is a monumental accomplishment. In the rapids of the Left Bank in the 1940s, some hardcore artistic talent survived the Nazi Occupation and founded the various versions of liberation which still enrich the West today. (more…)
The Scholarship of Ageing : progress is being made!
Well, first of all, this is a book so well written that one’s faith in American non-fiction letters is almost restored in one go. (more…)
Aging : An Apprenticeship (Ed. Nan Narboe)
You are, one way or another, perhaps in the age business. Your company is trying to build a rich dialogue with older shoppers, tourists, students… Your campaigning organisation lobbies for better treatment for elderly patients, grey voters, the locally bereaved and bereft... Your political party has to consider how the sexa-septua-octogenarians ought to be addressed, captured and, the bitter thought, afforded... (more…)