Sixty : The Beginning of the End, or the End of the Beginning? by Ian Brown read online ebook PDF, MOBI, FB2
9781615193509 English 1615193502 From a multiple-award-winning author and journalist, a dispatch at once funny, serious, informative, wistful, and hopeful from the line between middle-aged and soon-to-be elderly This is the thing, you see: I am on my way to being an old man. But at sixty, I am still the youngest of old men. The day he turned 60, Ian Brown started a diary. He had begun to notice memory lapses, creaking knees, social invisibility and yet he was troubled that many people think of 60 as old, because he rarely felt any older than he had at 40. Finding little in the literature of aging to explain exactly what was going on, he set out to notice the details of time passing, slow them down, and understand them all without panicking. Written with his trademark gutsy candor, and full of self-deprecating wit (Globe and Mail), Sixty chronicles Brown s discovering how the age of 60 is a state of body and of mind. An unforgettable account of one person trying, and sometimes succeeding, to face the inevitable, it perfectly captures the obsessions of a generation realizing that they are no longer young.", From a multiple-award-winning author and journalist, a dispatch--at once funny, serious, informative, wistful, and hopeful--from the line between middle-aged and soon-to-be elderly "This is the thing, you see: I am on my way to being an old man. But at sixty, I am still the youngest of old men." The day he turned 60, Ian Brown started a diary. He had begun to notice memory lapses, creaking knees, social invisibility--and yet he was troubled that many people think of 60 as "old," because he rarely felt any older than he had at 40. Finding little in the literature of aging to explain exactly what was going on, he set out to notice the details of time passing, slow them down, and understand them--all without panicking. Written with his "trademark gutsy candor, and full of self-deprecating wit" (Globe and Mail), Sixty chronicles Brown's discovering how the age of 60 is a state of body and of mind. An unforgettable account of one person trying , and sometimes succeeding, to face the inevitable, it perfectly captures the obsessions of a generation realizing that they are no longer young., From the author of the award-winning The Boy in the Moon comes a wickedly honest and brutally funny account of the year in which Ian Brown realized that the man in the mirror was actually . . . sixty. Brown began keeping a diary of his sixty-fist year with a Facebook post on the morning of February 4, 2014, his sixtieth birthday. As well as wanting to maintain a running tally on how he survived the year, Brown set out to explore what being sixty means physically, psychologically, and intellectually. "What pleasures are gone forever? Which ones, if any, are left? What did Beethovan, or Schubert, or Jagger, or Henry Moore, or Lucian Freud do after they turned sixty?" And more importantly, "How much life can you life in the fourth quarter, not knowing when the game might end?" Sixty is a report from the front, a dispatch from the Maginot Line that divides the middle-aged from the soon to be elderly. As Brown writes, "It is the age when the body begins to dominate the mind or vice versa, when time begins to disappear and loom, but never in a good way, when you have no choice but to admit that people have stopped looking your way, and that in fact they stopped looking twenty years ago." His prose, which has garnered multiple book and journalism awards, has a naked honesty that shocks, delights, and enlightens as he turns his restless eye on himself, and also captures the obsessions of a generation facing the undeniable fact that they are no longer young. With formidable candor, Brown tries to answer this question: "Does aging and elderliness deserve to be dreaded--and how much of that dread can be held at bay by a reasonable human being?" For that matter, for a man of sixty, what even constitutes reasonableness?, Ian Brown began keeping a diary of his sixty-fist year with a Facebook post on the morning of February 4, 2014, his sixtieth birthday. As well as wanting to maintain a running tally on how he survived the year, Brown set out to explore what being sixty means physically, psychologically, and intellectually. What pleasures are gone forever? Which ones, if any, are left? What did Beethovan, or Schubert, or Jagger, or Henry Moore, or Lucian Freud do after they turned sixty? And more importantly, How much life can you live in the fourth quarter, not knowing when the game might end? "Sixty" is a report from the front, a dispatch from the Maginot Line that divides the middle-aged from the soon-to-be elderly. As Ian Brown writes, It is the age when the body begins to dominate the mind or vice versa, when time begins to disappear and loom, but never in a good way, when you have no choice but to admit that people have stopped looking your way, and that in fact they stopped looking twenty years ago. His prose, which has garnered multiple book and journalism awards, has a naked honesty that shocks, delights, and enlightens as he turns his restless eye on himself, and also captures the obsessions of a generation facing the undeniable fact that they are no longer young. With formidable candor, Brown tries to answer this question: Does aging and elderliness deserve to be dreaded and how much of that dread can be held at bay by a reasonable human being? For that matter, for a man of sixty, what even constitutes reasonableness?", This is the thing, you see: I am on my way to being an old man. But at sixty, I am still the youngest of old men. As Ian Brown's sixtieth birthday loomed, every moment seemed to present a choice: Confront, or deny, the biological fact that the end was now closer than the beginning. True, he was beginning to notice memory lapses, creaking knees, and a certain social invisibility--and yet, it troubled him that many people think of sixty as "old," because he rarely felt older than at forty. An award-winning writer, Brown instead chose to notice every moment, try to understand it, capture it . . . all without panicking. Sixty is the result: Brown's uncensored account of his sixty-first year, and, informed by his reportorial gifts, his investigation of the many changes--physical, mental, and emotional--that come to all of us as we age. Brown is a master of the seriocomic, and his day-to-day dramas--as a husband, father, brother, son, friend, and neighbor--are rendered, inseparably, with wistfulness and laugh-out-loud wit. He is also a discerning, prolific reader, and it is a pure pleasure being privy to his thoughts on the dozens of writers--including Virginia Woolf, Philip Larkin, A. J. Liebling, WisÃ…,awa Szymborska, Clive James, Sharon Olds, and Karl Ove Knausgaard--who speak to him most, at sixty. From an author on whom the telling detail is never lost, Sixty is a richly informative, candid report from the line between middle-aged and soon-to-be-elderly. It perfectly captures the obsessions of a generation realizing that they are no longer young.
9781615193509 English 1615193502 From a multiple-award-winning author and journalist, a dispatch at once funny, serious, informative, wistful, and hopeful from the line between middle-aged and soon-to-be elderly This is the thing, you see: I am on my way to being an old man. But at sixty, I am still the youngest of old men. The day he turned 60, Ian Brown started a diary. He had begun to notice memory lapses, creaking knees, social invisibility and yet he was troubled that many people think of 60 as old, because he rarely felt any older than he had at 40. Finding little in the literature of aging to explain exactly what was going on, he set out to notice the details of time passing, slow them down, and understand them all without panicking. Written with his trademark gutsy candor, and full of self-deprecating wit (Globe and Mail), Sixty chronicles Brown s discovering how the age of 60 is a state of body and of mind. An unforgettable account of one person trying, and sometimes succeeding, to face the inevitable, it perfectly captures the obsessions of a generation realizing that they are no longer young.", From a multiple-award-winning author and journalist, a dispatch--at once funny, serious, informative, wistful, and hopeful--from the line between middle-aged and soon-to-be elderly "This is the thing, you see: I am on my way to being an old man. But at sixty, I am still the youngest of old men." The day he turned 60, Ian Brown started a diary. He had begun to notice memory lapses, creaking knees, social invisibility--and yet he was troubled that many people think of 60 as "old," because he rarely felt any older than he had at 40. Finding little in the literature of aging to explain exactly what was going on, he set out to notice the details of time passing, slow them down, and understand them--all without panicking. Written with his "trademark gutsy candor, and full of self-deprecating wit" (Globe and Mail), Sixty chronicles Brown's discovering how the age of 60 is a state of body and of mind. An unforgettable account of one person trying , and sometimes succeeding, to face the inevitable, it perfectly captures the obsessions of a generation realizing that they are no longer young., From the author of the award-winning The Boy in the Moon comes a wickedly honest and brutally funny account of the year in which Ian Brown realized that the man in the mirror was actually . . . sixty. Brown began keeping a diary of his sixty-fist year with a Facebook post on the morning of February 4, 2014, his sixtieth birthday. As well as wanting to maintain a running tally on how he survived the year, Brown set out to explore what being sixty means physically, psychologically, and intellectually. "What pleasures are gone forever? Which ones, if any, are left? What did Beethovan, or Schubert, or Jagger, or Henry Moore, or Lucian Freud do after they turned sixty?" And more importantly, "How much life can you life in the fourth quarter, not knowing when the game might end?" Sixty is a report from the front, a dispatch from the Maginot Line that divides the middle-aged from the soon to be elderly. As Brown writes, "It is the age when the body begins to dominate the mind or vice versa, when time begins to disappear and loom, but never in a good way, when you have no choice but to admit that people have stopped looking your way, and that in fact they stopped looking twenty years ago." His prose, which has garnered multiple book and journalism awards, has a naked honesty that shocks, delights, and enlightens as he turns his restless eye on himself, and also captures the obsessions of a generation facing the undeniable fact that they are no longer young. With formidable candor, Brown tries to answer this question: "Does aging and elderliness deserve to be dreaded--and how much of that dread can be held at bay by a reasonable human being?" For that matter, for a man of sixty, what even constitutes reasonableness?, Ian Brown began keeping a diary of his sixty-fist year with a Facebook post on the morning of February 4, 2014, his sixtieth birthday. As well as wanting to maintain a running tally on how he survived the year, Brown set out to explore what being sixty means physically, psychologically, and intellectually. What pleasures are gone forever? Which ones, if any, are left? What did Beethovan, or Schubert, or Jagger, or Henry Moore, or Lucian Freud do after they turned sixty? And more importantly, How much life can you live in the fourth quarter, not knowing when the game might end? "Sixty" is a report from the front, a dispatch from the Maginot Line that divides the middle-aged from the soon-to-be elderly. As Ian Brown writes, It is the age when the body begins to dominate the mind or vice versa, when time begins to disappear and loom, but never in a good way, when you have no choice but to admit that people have stopped looking your way, and that in fact they stopped looking twenty years ago. His prose, which has garnered multiple book and journalism awards, has a naked honesty that shocks, delights, and enlightens as he turns his restless eye on himself, and also captures the obsessions of a generation facing the undeniable fact that they are no longer young. With formidable candor, Brown tries to answer this question: Does aging and elderliness deserve to be dreaded and how much of that dread can be held at bay by a reasonable human being? For that matter, for a man of sixty, what even constitutes reasonableness?", This is the thing, you see: I am on my way to being an old man. But at sixty, I am still the youngest of old men. As Ian Brown's sixtieth birthday loomed, every moment seemed to present a choice: Confront, or deny, the biological fact that the end was now closer than the beginning. True, he was beginning to notice memory lapses, creaking knees, and a certain social invisibility--and yet, it troubled him that many people think of sixty as "old," because he rarely felt older than at forty. An award-winning writer, Brown instead chose to notice every moment, try to understand it, capture it . . . all without panicking. Sixty is the result: Brown's uncensored account of his sixty-first year, and, informed by his reportorial gifts, his investigation of the many changes--physical, mental, and emotional--that come to all of us as we age. Brown is a master of the seriocomic, and his day-to-day dramas--as a husband, father, brother, son, friend, and neighbor--are rendered, inseparably, with wistfulness and laugh-out-loud wit. He is also a discerning, prolific reader, and it is a pure pleasure being privy to his thoughts on the dozens of writers--including Virginia Woolf, Philip Larkin, A. J. Liebling, WisÃ…,awa Szymborska, Clive James, Sharon Olds, and Karl Ove Knausgaard--who speak to him most, at sixty. From an author on whom the telling detail is never lost, Sixty is a richly informative, candid report from the line between middle-aged and soon-to-be-elderly. It perfectly captures the obsessions of a generation realizing that they are no longer young.