Old Age: A Beginner's Guide by Michael Kinsley (2016)

This small book grabbed my eye in our Popular Reading section and since I have been feeling old recently, thought it help, and it did. Kinsley is a columnist and editor in publications like Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Economist and founded Slate and has been dealing with Parkinson's disease for 20 years, though he is only a bit older than me. He addresses us baby boomers as we are all aging. He has a lot of valuable observations, especially having lived with with some aging characteristics decades before the rest of us have to face them. "We are born thinking that we'll live forever. Then death becomes an intermittent reality, as grandparents and parents die, and tragedy of some kind removes one or two from our own age cohort. And then, at some point, death becomes a normal part of life - a faint dirge in the background that gradually gets louder." The main thought I came away with was that it is not that we want to live as long as possible, but to live as long as possible with all of our marbles. 

In his last chapter he looks at us baby boomers and compares us to the Greatest Generation. He refutes some of the common assumptions about both. I realize that my generation has done a lot of good, but has negative sides, like sowing mistrust of authority and government, often rightfully so, but it has gotten extreme on both sides of the political fence. Kinsley suggests that my generation leave some sort of positive legacy, large gesture, like helping America get out of debt, possibly by reinstating estate taxes. 

The whole book reads easily and actually had me laughing at times - a good approach to aging. All in all, might we worth buying this book to have on hand.