The Power of Experience: Great Writers Over 50 on the Quest for a Lifetime of Meaning
Author: Jeremy Janes
What is the value of a life deeply lived? Can fragments from the past help you navigate the future? What good is wisdom in a world bewitched by ephemera?
Some of our best writers over 50 tackle these and other questions in this honest, hard-hitting collection about the search for meaning in the second half of life. In moving works of self-discovery, they illuminate the fine art of growing up and the power of experience to transform your life.
Amy Tan, for example, opens the door on her turbulent relationship with her mother, fueled by her realization that she “would never meet my mother’s standards of beauty.”
Robert Stone examines the web of relationships maintained by an ordinary man—and how an extraordinary occurrence forces him to understand, at last, what it means to become an adult. Richard Russo uses a nude beach as the perfect setting to bare the rifts in a troubled marriage—and its ever-present capacity to be healed by “a sudden and powerful resurgence of affection and trust.”
Our compulsion to recapture what Russo terms our “old, younger selves” emerges forcefully in verse as well. Maxine Hong Kingston undergoes a mid-career change of heart that has her mocking her muse (“I have misplaced two mindfulness belts, just when I’m learning not to lose glasses and keys so often”). And Billy Collins antically contemplates a few places in which he really wouldn’t mind being caught dead.
“As we stand on the mountaintop of midlife and look back at the path we’ve taken,” writes Gail Sheehy in her introduction, “the stories we tell ourselves must change.” This one-of-a-kind anthology is an invitation to re-imagine those stories—and to unearth parts of ourselves that have lain dormant far too long. Reading this book, Sheehy adds, will inspire you “to turn over your own fields of memory. If we do the same spade-work, we may be able to reframe a crucial recollection and use it as a signpost for the rest of our journey.”
Read also The Constitution in Exile or Constitution of the United States of America
Parenting a Bipolar Child: What to Do and Why
Author: Gianni Faedda
When a child or adolescent is diagnosed with bipolar disorder, it's hard for his or her parents to know exactly what to do. What constitutes an effective therapeutic approach to help their bipolar child navigate childhood and adolescence? In this book, a psychiatrist and a psychologist, both specializing in mood disorders, offer a comprehensive overview of the available treatment options and most effective parenting strategies for dealing with this serious condition.
In addition to a thorough explanation of the often necessary medical treatments for bipolar disorder, the book also details the importance of emotional regulation in bipolar children. Techniques for dealing with displays of rage, anger, and irritability in children are covered. The book also addresses sleep deprivation, one of the most common symptoms of childhood bipolar disorder, and the issues young people with bipolar disorder face in school. Subjects of particular interest to parents of older children and adolescents are covered, such as substance abuse, eating disorders, violence, and suicide. All of this information is complemented by advice on parental self-care and integrating the care of the bipolar child with the needs of the rest of the family.
Library Journal
Formerly known as manic-depressive illness, bipolar disorder (BPD) has become a headliner for pharmaceutical houses, psychiatric research and publications, and, now, books for the general public. But only in the last decade has the disorder been studied and treated extensively in the child and adolescent population, where it may account for as many as a third of those diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and half of all those diagnosed with depression. Well-informed parents, psychiatrists and pediatricians, and teachers and school administrators are indispensable to monitoring the disorder, hence the need for good books like these. The first author listed for each book, Demitri F. Papolos (psychiatry, Albert Einstein Coll. of Medicine, NY; codirector, Prog. in Behavioral Genetics) and Faedda, are New York psychiatrists; their coauthors, Janice Papolos and Austin, are a writer and a child psychologist, respectively. Somewhat more technical, The Bipolar Child includes a substantial chapter on genetics. Parenting a Bipolar Child primarily addresses families of patients and states correctly that psychotherapy is crucial to the success of overall treatment. These two books are highly recommended for general libraries and health collections, along with two more that are broader in scope: Dwight L. Evans and Linda Wasmer Andrews's If Your Adolescent Has Depression or Bipolar Disorder and and Glen R. Elliot's Medicating Young Minds. E. James Lieberman, George Washington Univ. Sch. of Medicine, Washington, DC Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
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