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Elderhood Spiral-Bound | 2021-03-02

Louise Aronson

★★★☆☆+ from 1,001 to 10,000 ratings

$21.39 - Free Shipping
The New York Times bestseller from physician and award-winning writer Louise Aronson--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, we've made old age into a disease, a condition to be dreaded, disparaged, 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 that's 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 author's own words, "an aging, i.e., still-breathing human being."

Publisher: Macmillan
Original Binding: Trade Paperback
Pages: 464 pages
ISBN-10: 1620405474
Item Weight: 1.0 lbs
Dimensions: 5.5 x 1.3 x 8.2 inches
Customer Reviews: 3 out of 5 stars 1,001 to 10,000 ratings
"Exquisitely written . . . her idea of truly 'personalized medicine' incorporates the patient's past experiences and current expectations. This integrative, humanistic model of geriatrics is rare. One can only hope its practices are adopted swiftly." --Nature
"Wise and engaging." --AARP Magazine
"Bracing, always compassionate." --Wall Street Journal, Best Books About Retirement and Aging of 2019
"[A] penetrating meditation on geriatrics . . . Aronson's deep empathy, hard-won knowledge, and vivid reportage makes for one of the best accounts around of the medical mistreatment of the old." --Publishers Weekly, starred review

Louise Aronson is the author of A History of the Present Illness. She has received a MacDowell fellowship, four Pushcart nominations, the Gold Professorship for Humanism in Medicine, and many more. Her articles and stories have appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, and Bellevue Literary Review. She is a professor of medicine at UCSF, where she cares for older patients and directs UCSF Medical Humanities. She lives in San Francisco.