By Siddhartha Mukherjee – Scribner, 2010

In this fascinating, exhaustively researched volume, the author takes on the disease that has destroyed—and intrigued—humans since the start of recorded time. Mukherjee is an oncologist, medical educator and clinical researcher. His book is “an attempt to enter the mind of this immortal illness.” And so he does, tracing the history of cancer through extraordinary personalities and their work, including Sidney Farber, father of chemotherapy, philanthropist Mary Lasker and William Halsted, who developed the modern mastectomy. Case histories movingly illustrate his points. One of the most poignant is of a woman named Germaine, whose suffering taught Mukherjee that “to keep pace with this malady, you needed to keep inventing and reinventing, learning and unlearning strategies.” In 2015, PBS released a documentary based on the book, created by filmmaker Ken Burns.

By Corey M. Abramson – Harvard University Press, 2015 

We are all growing older, but we are not all aging on equal terms, says University of Arizona sociologist Corey M. Abramson in The End Game. With deeply detailed interviews of a diverse cast of adults aging in California’s Bay Area, Abramson gives readers a very personal view of how disparate education and economics have created what he calls an alarming “geriatric inequality” in America. The interviewees’ real-world experiences illustrate that people aging in middle-class neighborhoods have better housing, transportation, access to health care, social support—even groceries—than those in poorer communities, and that this imbalance has a direct impact on whether a person thrives or simply survives in the later years. Abramson challenges society to consider older adults as individuals rather than as a one-size-fits-all block, because, he says, what affects our elders today eventually affects us all.

By William H. Thomas, MD – VanderWyk & Burnham, 2007

“Our culture declares that adulthood is forever, that old age means decline, and that perfection is lodged in remaining young,” writes geriatrician Bill Thomas, a self-proclaimed abolitionist of the old way of being old. Adults (not to be confused with older adults or elders), he writes, are fixated on the perception of youthful vitality. They are not just defying age with wrinkle creams and medical miracles, they are denying it—living in fear of “old” from a very young age. This seminal book shows how this negativism is destroying quality of life not just for elders but also for families and society. Thomas challenges how we think about community structure, advertising and, especially, institutionalized nursing care, which is “plagued by loneliness, helplessness and boredom.” In Thomas’s world, elderhood reclaims its due respect and all generations are richer for it. This game-changer is a must for anyone who plans to age with dignity and purpose.