Book List

Silver Shades of Grey

by Kanwaljit Soin

About the Book

Are you a young person? Middle-aged? Old? It doesn’t really matter. Each of us grows older every second. Most of us age without taking charge of our life course, without a plan for our ageing. This book offers some operating instructions for life, a guide to engaging passionately with age!

Dealing with a plethora of subjects, such as health, happiness, loneliness, dementia, sex, gender, marriage, abuse, respect, wage, wealth, class, and care, the book touches on how ageing affects us as individuals and as a society.

It explores a few of the mysteries and miracles of life, and some of its myths. It encourages us to cope creatively with the mundaneness of our continuing life.

The author invites you to join her as she delves into these questions about life and ageing with curiosity and contemplation, and with a sense of awe and adventure.

Review

“Silver shades of grey uses a well curated collection of scientific evidence and facts that demonstrates how ageing impacts how we live, work and play. The sooner we realize that ageing overlaps every sector of our economy, the faster we will capture the opportunities of enabling health longevity and successful ageing. This book is a must-read resource for those that care deeply about older adults and support a mindset shift in the future of ageing.”

— Janice Chia, Founder and CEO, Ageing Asia and ASPIRE55, Singapore

Lifespan: Why We Age – and Why We Don’t Have To

by David A Sinclair

About the Book

A paradigm-shifting book from an acclaimed Harvard Medical School scientist and one of Time’s most influential people.

It’s a seemingly undeniable truth that aging is inevitable. But what if everything we’ve been taught to believe about aging is wrong? What if we could choose our lifespan?

In this groundbreaking book, Dr. David Sinclair, leading world authority on genetics and longevity, reveals a bold new theory for why we age. As he writes: “Aging is a disease, and that disease is treatable.”

This eye-opening and provocative work takes us to the frontlines of research that is pushing the boundaries on our perceived scientific limitations, revealing incredible breakthroughs—many from Dr. David Sinclair’s own lab at Harvard—that demonstrate how we can slow down, or even reverse, aging. The key is activating newly discovered vitality genes, the descendants of an ancient genetic survival circuit that is both the cause of aging and the key to reversing it. Recent experiments in genetic reprogramming suggest that in the near future we may not just be able to feel younger, but actually become younger.

Through a page-turning narrative, Dr. Sinclair invites you into the process of scientific discovery and reveals the emerging technologies and simple lifestyle changes—such as intermittent fasting, cold exposure, exercising with the right intensity, and eating less meat—that have been shown to help us live younger and healthier for longer. At once a roadmap for taking charge of our own health destiny and a bold new vision for the future of humankind, Lifespan will forever change the way we think about why we age and what we can do about it.

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

by Atul Gawande

About the Book

From Atul Gawande, a book that has the potential to change medicine – and lives.

Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming the dangers of childbirth, injury, and disease from harrowing to manageable. But when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should.

Through eye-opening research and gripping stories of his own patients and family, Gawande reveals the suffering this dynamic has produced. Nursing homes, devoted above all to safety, battle with residents over the food they are allowed to eat and the choices they are allowed to make. Doctors, uncomfortable discussing patients’ anxieties about death, fall back on false hopes and treatments that are actually shortening lives instead of improving them. And families go along with all of it.

In his bestselling books, Atul Gawande, a practicing surgeon, has fearlessly revealed the struggles of his profession. Now he examines its ultimate limitations and failures – in his own practices as well as others’ – as life draws to a close. And he discovers how we can do better. He follows a hospice nurse on her rounds, a geriatrician in his clinic, and reformers turning nursing homes upside down. He finds people who show us how to have the hard conversations and how to ensure we never sacrifice what people really care about.

Riveting, honest, and humane, Being Mortal shows that the ultimate goal is not a good death but a good life – all the way to the very end.

The Longevity Economy: Unlocking the World’s Fastest-Growing, Most Misunderstood Market

by Joseph F. Coughlin

About the Book

Oldness: a social construct at odds with reality that constrains how we live after middle age and stifles business thinking on how to best serve a group of consumers, workers, and innovators that is growing larger and wealthier with every passing day.

Over the past two decades, Joseph F. Coughlin has been busting myths about aging with groundbreaking multidisciplinary research into what older people actually want — not what conventional wisdom suggests they need. In The Longevity Economy, Coughlin provides the framing and insight business leaders need to serve the growing older market: a vast, diverse group of consumers representing every possible level of health and wealth, worth about $8 trillion in the United States alone and climbing.

Coughlin provides deep insight into a population that consistently defies expectations: people who, through their continued personal and professional ambition, desire for experience, and quest for self-actualization, are building a striking, unheralded vision of longer life that very few in business fully understand. His focus on women — they outnumber men, control household spending and finances, and are leading the charge toward tomorrow’s creative new narrative of later life — is especially illuminating.

Coughlin pinpoints the gap between myth and reality and then shows businesses how to bridge it. As the demographics of global aging transform and accelerate, it is now critical to build a new understanding of the shifting physiological, cognitive, social, family, and psychological realities of the longevity economy.

The Silver Market Phenomenon: Marketing and Innovation in the Aging Society

by Florian Kohlbacher, Cornelius Herstatt

About the Book

A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parent – and Ourselves

by Jane Gross

About the Book

When Jane Gross found herself suddenly thrust into a caretaker role for her eighty-five year-old mother, she was forced to face challenges that she had never imagined. As she and her younger brother struggled to move her mother into an assisted living facility, deal with seemingly never-ending costs, and adapt to the demands on her time and psyche, she learned valuable and important lessons. Here, the longtime New York Times expert on the subject of elderly care and the founder of the New Old Age blog shares her frustrating, heartbreaking, enlightening, and ultimately redemptive journey, providing us along the way with valuable information that she wishes she had known earlier. We learn why finding a general practitioner with a specialty in geriatrics should be your first move when relocating a parent; how to deal with Medicaid and Medicare; how to understand and provide for your own needs as a caretaker; and much more. Wise, smart, and ever-helpful, A Bittersweet Season is an essential guide to caring for aging parents.

The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully

by Joan Chittister

About the Book

Not only accepting but celebrating getting old, this inspirational and illuminating work looks at the many facets of the aging process, from purposes and challenges to struggles and surprises.

The Fountain of Age

by Betty Friedan

About the Book

Struggling to hold on to the illusion of youth, Friedan wrote, we have denied the reality and evaded the new triumphs of growing older. We have seen age only as decline. In this powerful and very personal book, Betty Friedan charted her own voyage of discovery, and that of others, into a different kind of aging.

Friedan found ordinary men and women, moving into their fifties, sixties, seventies, discovering extraordinary new possibilities of intimacy and purpose. In their surprising experiences, Friedan first glimpsed, then embraced, the idea that one can grow and evolve throughout life in a style that dramatically mitigates the expectation of decline and opens the way to a further dimension of “personhood.”

The Fountain of Age suggests new possibilities for every one of us, all founded on a solid body of startling but little-known scientific evidence. It demolishes those myths that have constrained us for too long and offers compelling alternatives for living one’s age as a unique, exuberant time of life, on its own authentic terms.

The Age of Ageing: How demographics are Changing the Global Economy and Our World

by George Magnus

About the Book

The year 2008 marks the beginning of the baby boomer retirement avalanche just as the different demographics in advanced and most developing countries are becoming more pronounced. People are worrying again that developments in global population trends, food supply, natural resource availability and climate change raise the question as to whether Malthus was right after all.

The Age of Aging explores a unique phenomenon for mankind and, therefore, one that takes us into uncharted territory. Low birth rates and rising life expectancy are leading to rapid aging and a stagnation or fall in the number of people of working age in Western societies. Japan is in pole position but will be joined soon by other Western countries, and some emerging markets including China. The book examines the economic effects of aging, the main proposals for addressing the implications, and how aging societies will affect family and social structures, and the type of environment in which the baby-boomers’ children will grow up.

The contrast between the expected old age bulge in Western nations and the youth bulge in developing countries has important implications for globalization, and for immigration in Western countries – two topics already characterized by rising discontent or opposition. But we have to find ways of making both globalization and immigration work for all, for fear that failure may lead us down much darker paths. Aging also brings new challenges for the world to address in two sensitive areas, the politicization of religion and the management of international security. Governments and global institutions will have to take greater responsibilities to ensure that public policy responses are appropriate and measured.

The challenges arising within aging societies, and the demographic contrasts between Western and developing countries make for a fractious world – one that is line with the much-debated ‘decline of the West’. The book doesn’t flinch from recognizing the ways in which this could become more visible, but also asserts that we can address demographic change effectively if governments and strengthened international institutions are permitted a larger role in managing change.

The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity

by Lynda Gratton, Andrew J. Scott

About the Book

What will your 100-year life look like?

Does the thought of working for 60 or 70 years fill you with dread? Or can you see the potential for a more stimulating future as a result of having so much extra time?

Many of us have been raised on the traditional notion of a three-stage approach to our working lives: education, followed by work and then retirement. But this well-established pathway is already beginning to collapse – life expectancy is rising, final-salary pensions are vanishing, and increasing numbers of people are juggling multiple careers. Whether you are 18, 45 or 60, you will need to do things very differently from previous generations and learn to structure your life in completely new ways.

The 100-Year Life is here to help.

Drawing on the unique pairing of their experience in psychology and economics, Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott offer a broad-ranging analysis as well as a raft of solutions, showing how to rethink your finances, your education, your career and your relationships and create a fulfilling 100-year life.

Aging Brilliantly: How to Eat, Move, Rest, and Socialize Your Way to Long Life

by Dr Patricia Pimentel Selassie

About the Book

Live well. Age slow.

Aging doesn’t have to mean getting old. There’s mounting evidence that particular behaviors and lifestyles seem to lead to “more life.” Aging Brilliantly is a guide to proven habits you can adopt at any age to help achieve not only longevity but also a happier, healthier existence.

Inspired by studies of the longest living people in the world, Aging Brilliantly offers specific approaches to exercise, food, relationships, and relaxation that can greatly enhance vitality. Each chapter includes action plans and quick tips for you to apply these new principles swiftly so you can begin living better–today.

Aging Well: Solutions to the Most Pressing Global Challenges of Aging

by William A. Haseltine, Jean Galiana

About the Book

Meeting the healthcare and social needs of the older population is a personal challenge for millions of Americans and billions more worldwide. It is also a growing global public health challenge. Aging Well is a comprehensive study on how to support the health and well-being of older adults. This book is a must-read for every person caring for aging relatives or loved ones with disabilities.

For those who read and enjoyed Atul Gawande s Being Mortal, this book is the perfect accompaniment. Aging Well provides intimate glimpses into the real-life challenges facing older adults today such as loneliness, community connection, aging in place, and the need for emergency care in the hospital and the home. Aging Well also offers caregivers, policymakers, and healthcare leaders insights into sustainable models of excellence that can reduce health spending while improving the health, well-being, and quality of life for older adults.

Learning and Memory in Normal Aging

by Donald H. Kausler

About the Book

Donald Kausler is one of the founding fathers of research on aging. Internationally recognized, his efforts have formed the cornerstone of research on how age affects memory and learning. Now, in one comprehensive volume, Kausler condenses research findings in this realm into one engaging and forthright book. What are the effects of aging on classical and operant conditioning? How does age affect memory capacity/transfer of learning skill acquisition? Kausler addresses all of these issues and more in a clearly presented, easily understood review of major research findings.

The Super Age 

by Bradley Schurman

About the Book

A demographic futurist explains the coming Super Age—when there will be more people older than sixty-five than those under the age of eighteen—and explores what it could mean for our collective future.

Societies all over the world are getting older, the result of the fact that we are living longer and having fewer children. At some point in the near future, much of the developed world will have at least twenty percent of their national populations over the age of sixty-five. Bradley Schurman calls this the Super Age. Today, Italy, Japan, and Germany have already reached the Super Age, and another ten countries will have gone over the tipping point in 2021. Thirty-five countries will be part of this club by the end of the decade. This seismic shift in the world population can portend a period of tremendous growth—or leave swaths of us behind.

Schurman explains how changing demographics will affect government and business and touch all of our lives. Fewer people working and paying income taxes, due to outdated employment and retirement practices, could mean less money feeding popular programs such as Social Security and Medicare—with greater numbers relying on them. The forced retirement or redundancy of older workers could impact business by creating a shortage of workers, which would likely drive wages up and result in inflation. Corporations, too, must rethink marketing strategies—older consumers are already purchasing the majority of new cars, and they are a growing and vitally important market for health technologies and housing. Architects and designers must re-create homes and communities that are more inclusive of people of all ages and abilities.

If we aren’t prepared for the changes to come, Schurman warns, we face economic stagnation, increased isolation of at-risk populations, and accelerated decline of rural communities. Instead, we can plan now to harness the benefits of the Super Age: extended and healthier lives, more generational cooperation at work and home, and new markets and products to explore. The choice is ours to make.

Review

“Super Age provides a clear and concise reference to the fundamentals behind the social and economic potential of ageing. A must-read for the new entrants looking to understand the business of ageing, it is a source of motivation to frontrunners on the untapped opportunities that still lie ahead and for the community at large – a bright outlook into a world driven by rising longevity. Bradley Schuman’s book is a timely reminder that building a super age of opportunities is our collective responsibility. Together, we can make a difference.”

— Janice Chia, Founder and CEO, Ageing Asia and ASPIRE55, Singapore