Happily Ever Older

While Being Mortal (Atul Gawande) helped us understand disease and death, and Successful Aging (Daniel J. Levitin) showed us older years can be a time of joy and resilience, Happily Ever Older reveals how the right living arrangements can create a vibrancy that defies age or ability. Reporter Moira Welsh has spent years investigating retirement homes and long-term care facilities and wants to tell the dangerous stories. Not the accounts of falls or bedsores or overmedication, but of seniors living with purpose and energy and love. Stories that could change the status quo. Welsh takes readers across North America and into Europe on a whirlwind tour of facilities with novel approaches to community living, including a day program in a fake town out of the 1950s, a residence where seniors school their student roommates in beer pong, and an aging-in-place community in a forest where everyone seems to have a pet or a garden or both. The COVID-19 pandemic cruelly showed us that social isolation is debilitating, and Welsh tells stories of elders living with friendship, new and old, in their later years. Happily Ever Older is a warm, inspiring blueprint for change, proof that instead of warehousing seniors, we can create a future with strong social connections and a reason to go on living.

Of today’s retired men, one third are reasonably happy, one third are dissatisfied, and one third have resigned themselves to their situation. After retiring, Dag Sebastian Ahlander, former Swedish Consul General in New York, learned the importance of relishing every age—despite setbacks and illnesses—in order to acquire wisdom and perspective and gain greater satisfaction for the years that remain. Drawing on his own experiences, Mr. Ahlander penned Handbook for Happy Old Men , offering 109 pieces of advice for making the change from Grumpy Old Man to Jolly Gent. Mr. Ahlander’s suggestions for a better retirement include: Don’t become a Micro Management Guru. Don’t try to reorganize your wife’s kitchen where you have never done a thing during your active years. You don´t have to comment on everything. Life is supposed to be lived, not commented upon. Don´t downsize. Now is your chance to enjoy the home you have spent a lifetime acquiring and arranging. Steer clear of your adult children´s big problems. You’ll just lose sleep. But do help them with the small stuff—you have the time now for practicalities, they don´t. Smile and people will smile back at you. A red bow tie helps! Handbook for Happy Old Men is both a thought-provoking call to transformation and a practical guide to making the simple changes that make your life that much happier. Remember, time may be short, but life is long. It’s high time to count your blessings and forget the rest. The choice is yours!

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.

Now an original movie on Prime Video starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine! When Solène Marchand, the thirty-nine-year-old owner of a prestigious art gallery in Los Angeles, takes her daughter, Isabelle, to meet her favorite boy band, she does so reluctantly and at her ex-husband’s request. The last thing she expects is to make a connection with one of the members of the world-famous August Moon. But Hayes Campbell is clever, winning, confident, and posh, and the attraction is immediate. That he is all of twenty years old further complicates things. What begins as a series of clandestine trysts quickly evolves into a passionate relationship. It is a journey that spans continents as Solène and Hayes navigate each other’s disparate worlds: from stadium tours to international art fairs to secluded hideaways in Paris and Miami. And for Solène, it is as much a reclaiming of self, as it is a rediscovery of happiness and love. When their romance becomes a viral sensation, and both she and her daughter become the target of rabid fans and an insatiable media, Solène must face how her new status has impacted not only her life, but the lives of those closest to her.

One part personal quest to discover running greatness after age 50, one part investigation into what the women's running boom can teach athletes about becoming fitter, stronger, and faster as we age, Older, Faster, Stronger is an engrossing narrative sure to inspire women of all ages. A former overweight smoker turned marathoner, Margaret Webb runs with elite older women, follows a high-performance training plan devised by experts, and examines research that shows how endurance training can stall aging. She then tests herself against the world's best older runners at the world masters games in Torino, Italy. Millions of women have taken up running in recent decades--the first generation of women to train in great numbers. Women are qualifying for the Olympic marathon in their 50s, running 100-mile ultra marathons in their 60s, completing Ironmans in their 80s, competing for world masters records in their 90s. What are the secrets of these ageless wonders? How do they get stronger and faster long after their "athletic prime"? Is there an evolutionary reason women can maintain endurance into advanced years? Webb immerses herself in these questions as she as she trains to see just how fast she can get after 50.

'I loved every bit of this novel, and finished it with a giant smile on my face' - Jodi Picoult, New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Two Ways. Liza never dreamed that anyone would be interested in her life, let alone buy a book about it. But when she publishes a thinly veiled novel about a woman posing as a millennial, called Younger, not only is the book a hit, but her old friend Kelsey wants to turn into a TV show. Flying off to Los Angeles to help write the pilot, Liza leaves behind her on-again off-again boyfriend Josh, her pregnant daughter, and her best friend Maggie. But as Liza is swept up in the heady world of Hollywood, she finds herself thinking less and less of her life back home in New York. And when she meets Hugo Fielding - the devastatingly handsome and incredibly flirtatious Brit playing her boss on the show - she toes the line between having a crush and falling in love. Torn between New York and Los Angeles, a familiar love and a risky one, an established career and a shot at stardom, Liza must decide if it's too late to go to the ball . . . and if she even wants to. The hotly anticipated sequel to the beloved Younger - now a hit TV series from the creator of Sex and the City, Darren Star, starring Sutton Foster and Hilary Duff.

Summary: Describes the energy crisis, its link to the gross national product, and alternatives for current and future fuel resources.