How do some people avoid the slowing down, deteriorating, and weakening that plagues many of their peers decades earlier? Are they just lucky? Or do they know something the rest of us don’t? Is it possible to grow older without getting sicker? What if you could look and feel fifty through your eighties and nineties? Founder of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and one of the leading pioneers of longevity research, Dr. Nir Barzilai’s life’s work is tackling the challenges of aging to delay and prevent the onset of all age-related diseases including “the big four”: diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s. One of Dr. Barzilai’s most fascinating studies features volunteers that include 750 SuperAgers—individuals who maintain active lives well into their nineties and even beyond—and, more importantly, who reached that ripe old age never having experienced cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, or cognitive decline. In Age Later, Dr. Barzilai reveals the secrets his team has unlocked about SuperAgers and the scientific discoveries that show we can mimic some of their natural resistance to the aging process. This eye-opening and inspirational book will help you think of aging not as a certainty, but as a phenomenon—like many other diseases and misfortunes—that can be targeted, improved, and even cured.

'They are not for you but for a later age!' Ludwig van Beethoven, on the Opus 59 quartets. Tackling the Beethoven quartets is a rite of passage that has shaped the Takács Quartet's work together for over forty years. Using the history of the composition and first performances of the quartets as the backbone to his story, Edward Dusinberre, first violinist of the Takács since 1993 - recounts the life of the Quartet from its inception in Hungary, through emigration to the US and its present-day life as one of the world's renowned string quartets. He also describes what it was like for him, as a young man fresh out of the Juilliard School, to join the Quartet as its first non-Hungarian member - an exhilarating challenge. Beethoven for a Later Age takes the reader inside the life of a quartet, vividly showing how four people enjoy making music together over a long period of time. The key, the author argues, is in balancing continuity with change and experimentation - a theme that also lies at the heart of Beethoven's remarkable compositions.

Dr. Rosenfeld spells out the details on how to prevent, treat, and/or slow down virtually every disorder and complication of aging, including Alzheimer's, cancer, heart disease, impotence, cataracts, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, stroke, and loss of vision.

The Migration Age is still envisioned as an onrush of expansionary "Germans" pouring unwanted into the Roman Empire and subjecting it to pressures so great that its western parts collapsed under the weight. Further developing the themes set forth in his classic Barbarians and Romans, Walter Goffart dismantles this grand narrative, shaking the barbarians of late antiquity out of this "Germanic" setting and reimagining the role of foreigners in the Later Roman Empire. The Empire was not swamped by a migratory Germanic flood for the simple reason that there was no single ancient Germanic civilization to be transplanted onto ex-Roman soil. Since the sixteenth century, the belief that purposeful Germans existed in parallel with the Romans has been a fixed point in European history. Goffart uncovers the origins of this historical untruth and argues that any projection of a modern Germany out of an ancient one is illusory. Rather, the multiplicity of northern peoples once living on the edges of the Empire participated with the Romans in the larger stirrings of late antiquity. Most relevant among these was the long militarization that gripped late Roman society concurrently with its Christianization. If the fragmented foreign peoples with which the Empire dealt gave Rome an advantage in maintaining its ascendancy, the readiness to admit military talents of any social origin to positions of leadership opened the door of imperial service to immigrants from beyond its frontiers. Many barbarians were settled in the provinces without dislodging the Roman residents or destabilizing landownership; some were even incorporated into the ruling families of the Empire. The outcome of this process, Goffart argues, was a society headed by elites of soldiers and Christian clergy—one we have come to call medieval.

Throughout history certain forms and styles of dress have been deemed appropriate - or more significantly, inappropriate - for people as they age. Older women in particular have long been subject to social pressure to tone down, to adopt self-effacing, covered-up styles. But increasingly there are signs of change, as older women aspire to younger, more mainstream, styles, and retailers realize the potential of the 'grey market'. Fashion and Age is the first study to systematically explore the links between clothing and age, drawing on fashion theory and cultural gerontology to examine the changing ways in which age is imagined, experienced and understood in modern culture through the medium of dress. Clothes lie between the body and its social expression, and the book explores the significance of embodiment in dress and in the cultural constitution of age. Drawing on the views of older women, journalists and fashion editors, and clothing designers and retailers, it aims to widen the agenda of fashion studies to encompass the everyday dress of the majority, shifting the debate about age away from its current preoccupation with dependency, towards a fuller account of the lived experience of age. Fashion and Age will be of great interest to students of fashion, material culture, sociology, sociology of age, history of dress and to clothing designers.

Cognitive Analytic Therapy and Later Life explores the specialist skills required when working with older people.

“A fascinating look at how scientists are working to help doctors treat the aging process itself, helping us all to lead longer, healthier lives.” —Sanjay Gupta, MD Aging—not cancer, not heart disease—is the underlying cause of most human death and suffering. The same cascade of biological changes that renders us wrinkled and gray also opens the door to dementia and disease. We work furiously to conquer each individual disease, but we never think to ask: Is aging itself necessary? Nature tells us it is not: there are tortoises and salamanders who are spry into old age and whose risk of dying is the same no matter how old they are, a phenomenon known as “biological immortality.” In Ageless, Andrew Steelecharts the astounding progress science has made in recent years to secure the same for humans: to help us become old without getting frail, to live longer without ill health or disease.

Vanity Fair columnist Michael Kinsley escorts his fellow Boomers through the door marked "Exit." The notorious baby boomers—the largest age cohort in history—are approaching the end and starting to plan their final moves in the game of life. Now they are asking: What was that all about? Was it about acquiring things or changing the world? Was it about keeping all your marbles? Or is the only thing that counts after you’re gone the reputation you leave behind? In this series of essays, Michael Kinsley uses his own battle with Parkinson’s disease to unearth answers to questions we are all at some time forced to confront. “Sometimes,” he writes, “I feel like a scout from my generation, sent out ahead to experience in my fifties what even the healthiest Boomers are going to experience in their sixties, seventies, or eighties.” This surprisingly cheerful book is at once a fresh assessment of a generation and a frequently funny account of one man’s journey toward the finish line. “The least misfortune can do to make up for itself is to be interesting,” he writes. “Parkinson’s disease has fulfilled that obligation.”