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4.5
You don't often come across a book like this one that doesn't mince words or divert our attention from the actualities of aging. Rubin takes us deeply into the country of age with neither an unrealistic optimism nor a cynical pessimism. Old age is what it is--the final years of our lives. It comes with various ailments and infirmities, and also with a lifetime of accumulated experience. As the author herself is a woman in her eighties who alternates between writing about her own experience and summarizing the literature on the subject, the book encompasses the state of the art in terms of what growing old feels like. There is no truth more difficult to face than our own mortality and a virtual industry of products, euphemisms, activities, and downright lies has developed to help us avoid that truth. Rubin dismantles the denials one after another, yet the book is not depressing--in fact, its very existence proclaims what is possible to achieve in one's ninth decade of life. I wish it had an index and a bibliography, but other than that, its an excellent introduction to what is always unfamiliar terrain.
