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Elderhood

Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

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About this listen

 Bloomsbury presents Elderhood by Louise Aronson, MD, read by Eliza Foss.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction
A New York Times Bestseller
Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
Winner of the WSU AOS Bonner Book Award
Winner of the 2022 At Home With Growing Older Impact Award

As revelatory as Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, physician and award-winning author Louise Aronson’s Elderhood is an essential, empathetic look at a vital but often disparaged stage of life.

For more than 5,000 years, "old" has been defined as beginning between the ages of 60 and 70. 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. 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.

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.

Elderhood is for anyone who is, in the author's own words, "an aging, i.e., still-breathing human being."©2019 Louise Aronson, MD (P)2019 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Gerontology Medical Medicine & Health Care Industry Policy & Administration Politics & Government Professionals & Academics Social Policy Social Sciences Medicine Health Care Health Ageing
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Louise Aronson brings two things to humanity. 1. She honours the individuality of older adults by not claiming the answer, she acknowledges that elder-hood is as diverse as the people who lice it. 2. She invites readers into the conversation. Rather than prescribing, She exploring, allowing us to sit alongside her, to question and reimagine together. Her passion is like a fierce commitment to dignity, respect, and reframing aging as a life stage of possibility, not decline. Thank you.

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