Retirement Reading

"Retirement Reading: Bibliotherapy for the Over Sixties," is intended for boomers as they either contemplate retirement or want to find out what they might have to look forward to in life's next stage. The book is designed to fill a gap in the market saturated with books about retirement that deal almost exclusively with financial and health issues not with the experience of what kind of life experience you can expect in your post 60 years. "What these other retirement books miss" according to co-author Dr Laurence Peters is to "understand that life over sixty challenges you to the core-and forces you to come to terms with who you have been and what goals you have yet to achieve in remarkable and sometimes unsettling ways. While no one book has all the answers we believe that you will find more than a few pointers following our close reading of over fifty of the most powerful fiction and non fiction written over the past 2,000 years." The method advocated, biblotherapy, has its roots back in Ancient Egypt when the motto over the world's oldest library, was "House of Healing for the Soul,"happens to be the fastest growing form of cognitive therapy is ideally designed to help over 60s adjust to their new status. The book is divided into seven chapters, Attitudes to Aging, Ancient and Modern, Physical Decline and Disease, Memories, Memoirs, Looking Back and Questions of Meaning. A total of 53 books are discussed under these headings, a mix of autobiography (Springsteen's "Born to Run" is included), fiction, many Updike and Roth novels are discussed as well as a range of nonfiction such as the recent Sarah Bakewell's "In the Existentialist Cafe" and Michael Kinsley's "Old Age: A Beginners Guide". Mixed in are ancient authors such as Marcus Aurelius still very contemporary "Meditations" and Cicero's "On Old Age."