Showing titles in Gerontology

In the 21st century, a developmental phase of life is emerging as significant and distinct, capturing our interest, engaging our curiosity, and expanding our understanding of human potential and development. Demographers talk about this new chapter in life as characterized by people - those between ages 50 and 75 - who are considered "neither young nor old." In our "third chapters" we are beginning to redefine our views about the casualties and opportunities of aging.

At a time when many people around the world are living into their 10th decade, the longest longitudinal study of human development ever undertaken offers some welcome news for the new old age: Our lives continue to evolve in our later years and often become more fulfilling than before. Begun in 1938, the Grant Study of Adult Development charted the physical and emotional health of over 200 men, starting with their undergraduate days. The now-classic Adaptation to Life reported on the men's lives up to age 55 and helped us understand adult maturation.

Yoga instructor, nutrition expert, and healthy-living blogger Elise Marie Collins has compiled a comprehensive look at what "Super Agers" are doing to live long and prosper. Learn about movement at any age, brain fitness and memory maintenance, foods, vitamin and mineral content cues and clues, and what they do to promote health, prevent disease, and decrease and reverse symptoms of illness. In this revolutionary book, Collins presents us with a bold new paradigm of aging, telling us how we can increase not only our lifespan but also our health span.

The Ultimate Guide to Sex After Fifty delivers solid, practical information in a friendly, accessible style to help all genders and orientations, partnered or unpartnered, enjoy their sexuality for the rest of their lives.

Face is a book of fictional vignettes that examines the fear and vestigial evolutionary habits that have caused women and men to cultivate the imagined reality that older women’s faces are unattractive, undesirable, and something to be "fixed".

What are we going to do with those 20 or 30 years we didn’t expect? Due to unfounded fears of unhappiness and regret, many intelligent, otherwise rational people, even into their 40s and 50s, are so convinced that old age is a time of misery that they simply deny any other outcome and refuse to plan their own destiny. This optimistic and highly informative guide to smart aging will detail for listeners the steps they need to take to ensure that long life becomes synonymous with good life.

The Mature Mind delivers good news for those in the second half of life, with an extraordinary account of cutting-edge neuroscience, groundbreaking psychology, fascinating vignettes from history and case studies, and practical advice for personal growth strategies. Gene Cohen, a renowned psychiatrist and gerontologist, draws from more than thirty years of research to show that surprising positive changes in our brains have the powerful potential to enhance, not diminish, our lives after fifty.

Avec justesse et pudeur, l’auteur décrit la maladie, l’admission en maison de retraite et la mort de sa mère. À son expérience de fils, s’associe une réflexion approfondie sur la vieillesse et la dépendance dans notre société.

In How to Say It to Seniors, geriatric psychology expert David Solie offers help in removing the typical communication blocks many experience with the elderly. By sharing his insights into the later stages of life, Solie helps in understanding the unique perspective of seniors, and provides the tools to relate to them.

What if everything you thought you knew about aging was wrong? This bold account of the history and present-day realities of ageism by a nationally recognized gerontologist and speaker uncovers ageism's roots, impact, and how each of us can create a new reality of elderhood. Ageism Unmasked...

During her own year of transition—a milestone birthday, a wedding anniversary, the emptying of the nest—Walrond, in the buoyant and luminous style her listeners have come to love, does a deep dive into dimensions of getting older, including health, beauty, spirituality, connection, adventure, and meaning and purpose. Through conversations with social workers and neurologists, activists and clergy, Walrond satisfies her curiosity about why the dominant culture treats aging as a time of dwindling capacity.

Sex after Grief is the first book to address sex and grief together and treat sex as a normal, positive, life-affirming part of emerging from such a difficult time. Joan Price, the top expert on senior sex, draws on her own experiences as a widow since 2008, when she lost the love of her life to cancer. She shares her raw grief journey, sexual reawakening (and the many stumbles along the way), and attempts to dip back into dating, along with advice on handling each step.

In "You're Not Doing It Right," Ellen Patnaude bravely opens the door to the haunting reality of Lewy body dementia (LBD) and unravels its profound impact on families. One of the most common types of dementia after Alzheimer's disease, LBD is marked by fluctuations in cognition, hallucinations, and motor symptoms. The journey begins with subtle warnings of small changes in her mother's behavior that worry Patnaude's father, but go unnoticed by the author and her sibling.

The beauty industry - which once revolved around creams and powders, subtle agents to enhance beauty - has become the anti-aging industry, overrun with steroids, human growth hormone injections, and bio-identical hormones, all promoted as cures for getting old. Acclaimed BusinessWeek science reporter Arlene Weintraub takes us inside this world, from the marketing departments of huge pharmaceutical companies to the backroom of your local pharmacy to celebrity enthusiasts like Oprah.

Welcome to the dazzling new world of SuperAging, where everything you’ve been taught about aging is challenged. Getting older does not need to mean the end of accomplishment and growth. For SuperAgers, the period after age sixty-five can be one of the most productive and fulfilling times of life. SuperAging is already a reality for millions. But the science, business, and culture of aging have changed at such a rapid pace that they can be hard to keep up with. That’s where authors David Cravit and Larry Wolf can help.

Do you believe human life is inherently valuable? Unfortunately, in the secularized age of state-sanctioned euthanasia and abortion-on-demand, many are losing faith in the simple value of human life. To the disillusioned, human beings are a cosmic accident whose intrinsic value is worth no more than other animals. The Death of Humanity explores our culture's declining respect for the sanctity of human life drawing on philosophy and history to reveal the dark road ahead for society if we lose our faith.

American baby boomers are aging, and 15 million of them never had children. Who will take care of them? Unprecedented in US history, this demographic will create challenges for these individuals, as well as for society. This book is a passionate exploration of the path ahead for "Solo Agers". Author Sara Zeff Geber takes listeners on a journey, starting with the choice for childlessness and then suggests ways in which Solo Agers can mitigate the absence of adult children by relationship-building and rigorous planning for their future.

Since the birth of their nation, Americans have acted on the belief that theirs was a land of youth, a place destined to offer a fresh start to an aging world. No Country for Old Age tells this story from the founding period to our present moment, but not without exposing its darker side: rejuvenation has often bred grand expectations that end in division and despair.

The budget battles of recent years have amplified the warnings of demographic doomsayers who predicted that a wave of baby boomers would bleed America dry, bankrupting Social Security and Medicare as they faded into an impoverished old age. On the contrary, argues award-winning journalist Chris Farrell, we are instead on the verge of a broad, positive transformation of our economy and society.

In Losing It, William Ian Miller brings his inimitable wit and learning to the subject of growing old: too old to matter, of either rightly losing your confidence or wrongly maintaining it, culpably refusing to face the fact that you are losing it. The "it" in Miller's "losing it" refers mainly to mental faculties - memory, processing speed, sensory acuity, the capacity to focus. But it includes other evidence as wel l- sags and flaccidities, aches and pains, failing joints and organs. What are we to make of these tell-tale signs?