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 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 .
Elderhood is for anyone who is, in the author\'s own words, an aging, i.e., still-breathing human being..
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.
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.
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.
For more than 5,000 years, old has been defined as beginning between the ages of 60 and 70.
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 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
