Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life (Thorndike Large Print Lifestyles)

Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life (Thorndike Large Print Lifestyles) by Tharp, Twyla. library edition. ISBN: 9781432870829.

"As revelatory as Atul Gawandes Being Mortal, physician and award-winning author Louise Aronsons Elderhood is an essential, empathetic look at a vital but often disparaged stage of life. For more than 5,000 years, "old" has been defined as beginning between the ages of 60 and 70. That means most people alive today will spend more years in elderhood than in childhood, and many will be elders for 40 years or more. Yet at the very moment that humans are living longer than ever before, weve made old age into a disease, a condition to be dreaded, denigrated, neglected, and denied. Reminiscent of Oliver Sacks, noted Harvard-trained geriatrician Louise Aronson uses stories from her quarter century of caring for patients, and draws from history, science, literature, popular culture, and her own life to weave a vision of old age thats neither nightmare nor utopian fantasy--a vision full of joy, wonder, frustration, outrage, and hope about aging, medicine, and humanity itself. Elderhood is for anyone who is, in the authors own words, "an aging, i.e., still-breathing human being."--