30 Lessons for Living
30 Lessons for Living

Author: Karl Pillemer, Ph.D.

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2011-11-10

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1101545852

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

“Heartfelt and ever-endearing—equal parts information and inspiration. This is a book to keep by your bedside and return to often.”—Amy Dickinson, nationally syndicated advice columnist "Ask Amy" More than one thousand extraordinary Americans share their stories and the wisdom they have gained on living, loving, and finding happiness. After a chance encounter with an extraordinary ninety-year-old woman, renowned gerontologist Karl Pillemer began to wonder what older people know about life that the rest of us don't. His quest led him to interview more than one thousand Americans over the age of sixty-five to seek their counsel on all the big issues: children, marriage, money, career, aging. Their moving stories and uncompromisingly honest answers often surprised him. And he found that he consistently heard advice that pointed to these thirty lessons for living. Here he weaves their personal recollections of difficulties overcome and lives well lived into a timeless book filled with the hard-won advice these older Americans wish someone had given them when they were young. Like This I Believe, StoryCorps's Listening Is an Act of Love, and Tuesdays with Morrie, 30 Lessons for Living is a book to keep and to give. Offering clear advice toward a more fulfilling life, it is as useful as it is inspiring.

This Chair Rocks
This Chair Rocks

Author: Ashton Applewhite

Publisher: Celadon Books

Published: 2019-03-05

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 1250297249

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Author, activist, and TED speaker Ashton Applewhite has written a rousing manifesto calling for an end to discrimination and prejudice on the basis of age. In our youth obsessed culture, we’re bombarded by media images and messages about the despairs and declines of our later years. Beauty and pharmaceutical companies work overtime to convince people to purchase products that will retain their youthful appearance and vitality. Wrinkles are embarrassing. Gray hair should be colored and bald heads covered with implants. Older minds and bodies are too frail to keep up with the pace of the modern working world and olders should just step aside for the new generation. Ashton Applewhite once held these beliefs too until she realized where this prejudice comes from and the damage it does. Lively, funny, and deeply researched, This Chair Rocks traces her journey from apprehensive boomer to pro-aging radical, and in the process debunks myth after myth about late life. Explaining the roots of ageism in history and how it divides and debases, Applewhite examines how ageist stereotypes cripple the way our brains and bodies function, looks at ageism in the workplace and the bedroom, exposes the cost of the all-American myth of independence, critiques the portrayal of elders as burdens to society, describes what an all-age-friendly world would look like, and offers a rousing call to action. It’s time to create a world of age equality by making discrimination on the basis of age as unacceptable as any other kind of bias. Whether you’re older or hoping to get there, this book will shake you by the shoulders, cheer you up, make you mad, and change the way you see the rest of your life. Age pride! “Wow. This book totally rocks. It arrived on a day when I was in deep confusion and sadness about my age. Everything about it, from my invisibility to my neck. Within four or five wise, passionate pages, I had found insight, illumination, and inspiration. I never use the word empower, but this book has empowered me.” —Anne Lamott, New York Times bestselling author

Elderhood
Elderhood

Author: Louise Aronson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2019-06-11

Total Pages: 467

ISBN-13: 1620405482

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction A New York Times Bestseller Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction Winner of the WSU AOS Bonner Book Award Winner of the 2022 At Home With Growing Older Impact Award As revelatory as Atul Gawande's Being Mortal, physician and award-winning author Louise Aronson's 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, we've 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 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."

Families Caring for an Aging America
Families Caring for an Aging America

Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2016-12-08

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 0309448069

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Family caregiving affects millions of Americans every day, in all walks of life. At least 17.7 million individuals in the United States are caregivers of an older adult with a health or functional limitation. The nation's family caregivers provide the lion's share of long-term care for our older adult population. They are also central to older adults' access to and receipt of health care and community-based social services. Yet the need to recognize and support caregivers is among the least appreciated challenges facing the aging U.S. population. Families Caring for an Aging America examines the prevalence and nature of family caregiving of older adults and the available evidence on the effectiveness of programs, supports, and other interventions designed to support family caregivers. This report also assesses and recommends policies to address the needs of family caregivers and to minimize the barriers that they encounter in trying to meet the needs of older adults.

Retooling for an Aging America
Retooling for an Aging America

Author: Institute of Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2008-08-27

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 0309131952

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

As the first of the nation's 78 million baby boomers begin reaching age 65 in 2011, they will face a health care workforce that is too small and woefully unprepared to meet their specific health needs. Retooling for an Aging America calls for bold initiatives starting immediately to train all health care providers in the basics of geriatric care and to prepare family members and other informal caregivers, who currently receive little or no training in how to tend to their aging loved ones. The book also recommends that Medicare, Medicaid, and other health plans pay higher rates to boost recruitment and retention of geriatric specialists and care aides. Educators and health professional groups can use Retooling for an Aging America to institute or increase formal education and training in geriatrics. Consumer groups can use the book to advocate for improving the care for older adults. Health care professional and occupational groups can use it to improve the quality of health care jobs.

Aging as a Spiritual Practice
Aging as a Spiritual Practice

Author: Lewis Richmond

Publisher: Avery

Published: 2012-12-31

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1592407471

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Offers a Buddhist perspective on aging well, with anecdotes of the author's experiences with illness, aging, and transformation, and guided meditations.

Life Gets Better
Life Gets Better

Author: Wendy Lustbader

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2011-08-18

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 1101547677

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The acclaimed author of What's Worth Knowing reveals the truth about aging: Old age often offers a richer, better, and more self-assured life than youth. From our earliest lives, we are told that our youth will be the best time of our lives-that the energy and vitality of youth are the most important qualities a person can possess, and that everything that comes after will be a sad decline. But in reality, says Wendy Lustbader, youth is not the golden era it is often made out to be. For many, it is a time riddled with anxiety, angst, confusion, and the torture of uncertainty. Conversely, the media often feeds us a vision of growing older as a journey of defeat and diminishment. They are dead wrong. As Lustbader counters, "Life gets better as we get older, on all levels except the physical." Life Gets Better is not a precious or whimsical tome on the quirky wisdom of the elderly. Lustbader-who has worked for several decades as a social worker specializing in aging issues-conducted firsthand research with aging and elderly people in all walks of life, and she found that they overwhelmingly spoke of the mental and emotional richness they have drawn from aging. Lustbader discovered that rather than experiencing a decline from youth, aging people were happier, more courageous, and more interested in being true to their inner selves than were young people. Life Gets Better examines through first-person stories, as well as Lustbader's own observations, how a lifetime of lessons learned can yield one of the most personally and emotionally fruitful periods of anyone's life. As an eighty-six-year-old who contributed her story to the book noted, "For me, being old is the reward for outlasting all the big and little problems that happen to all of us along life's pathway." The collected stories in Life Gets Better provide a hopeful corrective to the fear of aging aggressively instilled in us by the media. Don't dread the future: The best years of our lives just may be ahead.

Imperfect Spirituality
Imperfect Spirituality

Author: Polly Campbell

Publisher: Cleis Press

Published: 2013-10-15

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1936740184

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Discusses how to render everyday moments and challenges into opportunities for spiritual growth, describing how to build a traditional spiritual life on top of a modern routine by engaging in short meditations and mindfulness.

The Gift of Years
The Gift of Years

Author: Joan Chittister

Publisher:

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781933346335

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Looks at the many dimensions of aging and considers the joys of this special stage of life as well as the rewards of being open to new experiences and new relationships.

The Life Extension Revolution
The Life Extension Revolution

Author: Philip Lee Miller, M.D.

Publisher: Bantam

Published: 2007-12-18

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0307418510

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

For the first time the lay public can benefit from the anti-aging secrets discovered by the Life Extension Foundation, the world’s largest, most respected organization dedicated to anti-aging research. Working with the Life Extension Foundation, renowned anti-aging physician Philip Lee Miller shows you how to retain your physical health and vigor, mental clarity, and youthful appearance–for life. This groundbreaking book translates cutting-edge anti-aging advances into a practical, easy-to-use program that will maximize your chances of living not only a long life–but a healthy, vibrant life. Drawing on his own clinical experience as well as the latest research from the Life Extension Foundation, Dr. Miller demystifies the aging process and provides you with: •Detailed strategies integrating the most advanced mainstream therapies with nutrients, hormones, and holistic approaches from around the world •A comprehensive plan to protect yourself from cancer, heart disease, arthritis, and Alzheimer’s disease at the cellular level by controlling inflammation and oxidation–two degenerative processes that cause us to age prematurely •A guide to individualizing this lifesaving program, including the Longevity Diet for maximum vitality and effortless weight loss and a unique supplement regimen–plus how to use medical tests to monitor your progress •An inspiring vision of the future of life extension science and what your future will be like without disease, premature death and aging–with novel strategies to help you get there This far-reaching anti-aging program will change your life forever. Like many of Dr. Miller’s patients, your physical and mental health will actually soar as you age chronologically. Your new longer, healthier life begins now as you embark on The Life Extension Revolution.