Sixty: A Diary of My Sixty-First Year

Two esteemed writers of a certain age present complementary reports of the perils and pleasures of aging. Award-winning Canadian journalist Brown (The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Search for His Disabled Son) chronicled the events and ruminations of his 61st year as he fought to make sense of the changes he began to experience as he entered "early" old age. Not a believer in living an unobserved life, Brown provides a year's worth of matter-of-fact diary entries focusing on both the large and small questions of getting older: altered relationships with family and friends, diminishing physical and mental capacities, and the comparative costs of graduated vs. plain trifocal glasses. Recognizing that regret is the enemy of a life well lived, Brown seeks to provide a prescription for living the last part of life as intentionally as the first. Wisdom of Ferris Bueller ("Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it") echoes behind Brown's endeavors to enjoy every bike ride, every beer, and, as far as life advice for baby boomers goes, it's solid.Lauded Australian novelist and journalist Garner (The Monkey Grip) relates details she's taken in over many years in this latest collection of short pieces addressing topics ranging from the invisibility of aging women to an analysis of the antipodean phenomenon that is Russell Crowe. Garner's unsentimental, but not heartless, accounts of, among others, her relationship with her mother or with a victim of the most awful variety of domestic abuse, demonstrate her range and capacity for emotional accuracy in the face of tremendous difficulty. Perhaps best known—recently—in the American media for yanking the hair of a bratty Australian schoolgirl who was harassing elderly Asian women on the street, Garner brings to the collection not only her tremendous powers of observation but a continued employment of those skills to force readers to confront unpleasant truths. The graceful prose with which she delivers her insights will challenge readers to look at what is happening around them.