It is Seniors Month and Wendy, Adult Services Librarian at the BWG Library, has compiled a list of her favourite titles celebrating and enhancing the wisdom of aging. From ways to reinvent the road ahead, to staying in shape, these are some of the hottest titles to explore being over 60.
Librarians are always looking for suggested books our community members would like to see in our collection. You can message any recommendations to the BWG Library through Facebook or email [email protected]. Help us grow our collection and let us know which resources you think we should share with the BWG community!
If I Knew Then, by Jann Arden
Jann Arden--bestselling author, recording artist and late-blooming TV star--is back with this funny, heartfelt and fierce memoir on becoming a woman of a certain age. The power, gravity and freedom she's found at fifty-seven are superpowers she believes all of us can unleash. Digging deep into her strengths, her failures and her losses, Jann Arden brings us an inspiring account of how she has surprised herself, in her fifties, by at last becoming completely her own person. Like many women, it took Jann a long time to realize that trying to be pleasing and likeable and beautiful in the eyes of others was a loser's game.
Letting it rip, and damning the consequences, is not only liberating, it's a hell of a lot of fun: "Being the age I am--that so many women are--is just the best time of my life." Jann weaves her own story together with tales of her mother, grandmother, and great grandmother, and the father she came close to hating, to show her younger self--and all of us--that fear and avoidance is no way to live. "What I'm thinking about now aren't all the ways I can try to hang on to my youth or all the seconds ticking by in some kind of morbid countdown to death," she writes, "but rather how I keep becoming someone I always hoped I could be. If I'm lucky one day a very old face will look back at me from the mirror, a face I once shied away from. I will love that old woman ferociously, because she has finally figured out how to live a life of purpose--not in spite of but because of all her mistakes and failures.
Growing Young, by Marta Zaraska
A smart, research-driven case for why optimism, kindness, and strong social networks will help us live to 100. From the day her daughter was born, science journalist Marta Zaraska fretted about what she and her family were eating. She fasted, considered adopting the keto diet, and ran a half-marathon. She bought goji berries and chia seeds and ate organic food. But then her research brought her to read countless scientific papers and to interview dozens of experts in various fields of study, including molecular biochemistry, epidemiology and neuroscience. What Marta discovered shattered her long-held beliefs about aging and longevity.
A strong support network of family and friends, she learned, lowers mortality risk by about 45 percent, while exercise only lowers it by about 23 percent. Volunteering your free time lowers it by 22 percent or so, while certain health fads like turmeric haven't been shown to help at all. These revelations led Marta Zaraska to a simple conclusion: In addition to healthy nutrition and physical activity, deepening friendships, practicing empathy and contemplating your purpose in life can improve your lifespan. Through eleven chapters that take her around the world, from catching wild mice in the woods of central England to flower arranging with octogenarians in Japan, from laboratories to "hugging centres," Marta embarks on an absorbing, entertaining and insightful journey to determine the habits that will have the greatest impact on our longevity. Deeply researched and expertly reported, Growing Young will dramatically change the way you seek a longer, happier life.
Fast Track to Aging Backwards, by Miranda Esmonde-White
A 30-day anti-aging program for rapid results using the fundamental movements and principles of the bestselling Aging Backwards, featuring an accelerated program for turning back the clock. The field of aging research has exploded with new clinical findings. Many misconceptions about aging—including the beliefs that disease, immobility, and pain are inevitable—have been debunked. Today, we know that the choices we make, from what we eat to how much and how we move, play a critical role in healthy aging.
In Aging Backwards: The Fast Track, Miranda offers readers systematic workouts to supplement and accelerate the original program, along with new information on the latest anti-aging science to help keep us strong, fully mobile, and looking and feeling young. Using her 30-day fast-track program, you’ll see rapid results in increased mobility, strength, flexibility, body shape, pain relief and overall health. Aging Backwards: The Fast Track empowers everyone—young and old, athletic or sedentary—with the information and tools to slow down the clock and keep it there.
The Age of Creativity, by Emily Urquhart
It has long been thought that artistic output declines in old age. When Emily Urquhart and her family celebrated the eightieth birthday of her father, the illustrious painter Tony Urquhart, she found it remarkable that, although his pace had slowed, he was continuing his daily art practice of drawing, painting, and constructing large-scale sculptures, and was even innovating his style. Was he defying the odds, or is it possible that some assumptions about the elderly are flat-out wrong?
With the eye of a memoirist and the curiosity of a journalist, Urquhart began an investigation into late-stage creativity, asking: Is it possible that our best work is ahead of us? Is there an expiry date on creativity? Do we ever really know when we've done anything for the last time? The Age of Creativity is a graceful, intimate blend of research on ageing and creativity, including on progressive senior-led organizations, such as a home for elderly theatre performers and a gallery in New York City that only represents artists over sixty, and her experiences living and travelling with her father. Emily Urquhart reveals how creative work, both amateur and professional, sustains people in the third act of their lives, and tells a new story about the possibilities of elder-hood."
In Our Prime, by Susan J. Douglas
With a sharp sense of justice and humor, Susan J. Douglas confronts ageism against women in media, work, and politics. In the 1970s, baby boom women began to redefine women's lives and opportunities. Now, that they are the largest American female generation over fifty, Susan J. Douglas argues that these feminist boomers are again challenging outdated stereotypes, and reinventing what it means to be older and female. This is a demographic revolution, and Douglas proposes that it's time for a new wave of activism to address ageism against women in all its manifestations.
In our prime takes on the cosmetics industry for its expensive products and anti-aging messages; big pharma for its images of docile grannies and puttering gardeners; and Hollywood and TV for seeing females over fifty as has-beens. She exposes the financial insecurity many face even as conservatives continue their attack on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid -- and calls on women of every age to unite to combat gendered ageism and to secure our country's financial safety net.
Blossoms in Autumn, by Aimee de Jongh
Ulysses is a 59-year-old widower who, since retiring, has been in the grip of loneliness. The former moving man is without direction or purpose. He can’t even find solace in the company of his children: his daughter is dead, his son consumed by work.
Mrs. Solenza is a 62-year-old former model. Once a magazine cover star, she now runs the family business: a cheese shop owned by her late mother. She, too, is alone.
Two lives drift sadly by, inching ever closer to old age. Until, one day, they collide—and an emotional earthquake happens. A unique collaboration between veteran comics writer Zidrou and rising star Aimée de Jongh, Blossoms in Autumn is a masterful exploration of growing old and falling in love.
