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.

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER SHORTLISTED FOR THE BALSILLIE PRIZE FOR PUBLIC POLICY It took the coronavirus pandemic to open our eyes to the deplorable state of so many of the nation's long-term care homes: the inhumane conditions, overworked and underpaid staff, and lack of oversight. In this timely new book, esteemed health reporter André Picard reveals the full extent of the crisis in eldercare, and offers an urgently needed prescription to fix a broken system. When COVID-19 spread through seniors' residences across Canada, the impact was horrific. Along with widespread illness and a devastating death toll, the situation exposed a decades-old crisis: the shocking systemic neglect towards our elders. Called in to provide emergency care in some of the hardest-hit facilities in Ontario and Quebec, the military issued damning reports of what they encountered. And yet, the failings that were exposed--unappetizing meals, infrequent baths, overmedication, physical abuse and inadequate personal care--have persisted for years in these institutions. In Neglected No More, André Picard takes a hard look at how we came to embrace mass institutionalization, and lays out what can and must be done to improve the state of care for our elders, a highly vulnerable population with complex needs and little ability to advocate for themselves. Picard shows that the entire eldercare system--fragmented, underfunded and unsupported--is long overdue for a fundamental rethink. We need to find ways to ensure seniors can age gracefully in the community for longer, with supportive home care and respite for family caregivers, and ensure that long-term care homes are not warehouses of isolation and neglect. Our elders deserve nothing less.

'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.

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.

For fans of David Sedaris and Nora Ephron, here is a humorous, irreverent, and poignant look at the gifts, stereotypes, and inevitable challenges of aging, based on the wildly popular New York Times essay from award-winning journalist Steven Petrow. Soon after his 50th birthday, Steven Petrow began assembling a list of “things I won’t do when I get old”—mostly a catalog of all the things he thought his then 70-something year old parents were doing wrong. That list, which included “You won’t have to shout at me that I’m deaf,” and “I won’t blame the family dog for my incontinence,” became the basis of this rousing collection of do’s and don’ts, wills and won’ts that is equal parts hilarious, honest, and practical. The fact is, we don’t want to age the way previous generations did. “Old people” hoard. They bore relatives—and strangers—with tales of their aches and pains. They insist on driving long after they’ve become a danger to others (and themselves). They eat dinner at 4pm. They swear they don’t need a cane or walker (and guess what happens next). They never, ever apologize. But there is another way . . . In Stupid Things I Won’t Do When I Get Old, Petrow candidly addresses the fears, frustrations, and stereotypes that accompany aging. He offers a blueprint for the new old age, and an understanding that aging and illness are not the same. As he writes, “I meant the list to serve as a pointed reminder—to me—to make different choices when I eventually cross the threshold to ‘old.’” Getting older is a privilege. This essential guide reveals how to do it with grace, wisdom, humor, and hope. And without hoarding.

"An inspirational look at the beauty found within the Circle of Life." —The Times "A straightforward, clear-cut how-to book for putting a spark (or two!) back into your life. It truly describes the magical beauty to be found in the twilight years." &mdashYule Biyung, author and inspirational speaker Thomas and Cindy Senior are the best-selling husband-and-wife team who authored Retiring Gracefully and Senior Sex: How to Rekindle the Sizzle in Your Bedroom. In The Joys of Getting Older the tradition of their previous books, they have collected all their best advice and share their insights into how you can lead a happy and energetic life after reaching "that certain age." The Seniors are living out their dream retirement in sunny Florida, where hurricanes and theme parks provide routine stimulation in their lives.