elderhood - louise aronson (2019)

fascinating deeply researched expansive and thoughtful. i especially enjoy the descriptions of her real patients and her insights into getting old and how it is viewed. she quotes de beauvoir: otherness is a fundamental category of human thought. and old age, of course, is the ultimate other group.

unfortunately also extremely verbose painfully pedantic and achingly cumbersome especially when she waxes on about her experience as a specialist in an orphan discipline, geriatrics. (hey, at least it's not family medicine!) i am obliged to start skimming from the two thirds mark.

non-fiction writing should have a limit on number of words per idea. keep it lyrical, i say, but there is no need to make it war and peace.