Old Age
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Average rating3.5
"Vanity Fair columnist Michael Kinsley escorts his fellow Boomers through the door marked "Exit." The largest age cohort in history--the notorious baby boomers--is approaching the end and starting to plan their final moves in the game of life. Now they are asking: What was that all about? Was it about acquiring things or changing the world? Was it about keeping all your marbles? Or is the only thing that counts after you've gone the reputation you leave behind? In this series of essays, Michael Kinsley uses his own battle with Parkinson's disease to unearth answers to questions we are all at some time forced to confront. "Sometimes," he writes, "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." This deeply affectionate book is at once a fresh assessment of a generation and a frequently funny account of one man's journey toward the finish line. "The least misfortune can do to make up for itself is to be interesting," he writes. "Parkinson's disease has fulfilled that obligation.""--
"A collection of essays on aging, Parkinson's disease, fame, and the legacy of the Baby Boomer generation"--
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You can reframe your fifties as the new forties. You can pile on the hair color and Botox and all of the other magical transformative potions. Nevertheless, we Boomers have been shocked to discover we have become old. Boomers have traveled every other path—childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, parenting years—together. This book is a little book of essays about that trip into old age. And our guide? A fellow Boomer who has, in addition to regular old age troubles, suffered from Parkinson's for the last twenty years.
If you are a Boomer, you can't miss this little book.
In Old Age, Michael Kinsley writes with a great deal of humor about a subject that many people do not find very funny. It was a quick and enjoyable read and although I am not from the Boomer generation, it made me think a lot about illness, old age, and what the ultimate goals.in life should be.
