Elderhood

By Louise Aronson

Book Overview

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction
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

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, as revelatory as Atul Gawande's Being Mortal.

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."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1620405474
• ISBN13: 9781620405475
• Release Date: March 2021
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.5" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Beyond Awesome!! Excellent book!

This is a book that should be read by every high school student, college, medical school students & residents every mother and father , sister and brother . This book compares similarities of children’s stages thru adulthood and elderly what we think and how they and we treat them.I am 62 and wished it was written sooner. I am a retired nurse and found this information accurate, very sad at times and hard to put down. Thank you so much DR. Louise Aronson for writing this book!!