louise aronson

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 moment that humans are living longer than ever, we’ve made old age into a disease, a condition to be dreaded, disparaged, neglected, and denied. 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. In Elderhood (Bloomsbury), Aronson challenges not only the way we look at aging, but also the…