AmericanBookFest.com

 

 

As you age, you may find yourself worrying about your memory. Where did I put those car keys? What time was my appointment? What was her name again? With more than 41 million Americans over the age of 65 in the United States, the question becomes how much (or, perhaps, what type) of memory loss is to be expected as one gets older and what should trigger a visit to the doctor.

 

Seven Steps to Managing Your Memory addresses these key concerns and more, such as...

Seven Steps to Managing Your Memory is written in an easy-to-read yet comprehensive style, featuring clinical vignettes and character-based stories that provide real-life examples of how to successfully manage age-related memory loss.

 

 

Being old does not have to mean being quiet, afraid, or betrayed by pain. While the transition to senior and elder is beset with difficult challenges, The Glories of Aging reveals how it can also be a time of appreciating beauty, seeing new perspectives, increasing self-knowledge, making a difference in the world, and learning more lessons before it is our time to go. This collection of twenty-three personal essays offers practical and brutally honest insights into coping with such vulnerabilities as physical limitation, loss of privacy, wishing and wanting, unpleasant surprises, trying to "look good," feelings of isolation, wardrobe shifts, making time count, and more.

 

 

In Brain Fitness Dr. Aihan Kuhn shares her expertise in tai chi, qigong, and medicine, giving readers exercises designed to prevent brain aging. This book represents a synthesis of Dr. Kuhn's studies in martial arts as well as Eastern and Western healing.

 

Tai chi and qigong practitioners around the world have long known that these arts promote fitness and self-defense. In this book Dr. Kuhn discusses their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual benefits. She emphasizes how tai chi and qigong aid in memory, emotional balance, and lifelong learning.

 

Dr. Kuhn says we have long assumed that getting older means facing a decline in memory, attention span, numerical ability, creativity, alertness, learning ability, and language.

 

“But we were wrong,” she adds. “New findings from science show that if the brain is consistently stimulated, no matter at what age, the brain can remain young and healthy.”

 

She has written Brain Fitness to help us all maintain that clarity, creativity, and vitality.

 

 

It Never Ends: Mothering Middle-Aged Daughters explores the complex challenges and unexpected rewards of aging mothers in their relationships with their midlife daughters. Based on interviews with women between 65 and 85, it illuminates issues of closeness, distance, longing, and need that arise. Mothers speak openly about the ongoing effects of the past on the present, the cultural, familial, and interpersonal conflicts that remain, and the varied and often invisible ways they continue mothering.

 

As mothers enter the last decades of their lives, their roles with their daughters often shift and change in complicated ways. Now that they are no longer central in caring for them as they once were, many experience a recalibrating of authority, autonomy, and independence. Their courage is apparent as they reflect on the mistakes they’ve made, acknowledge their regrets, and search to come to terms with their relationships as they now are.

 

 

Autism is a childhood condition ... right? Not right. Children with autism grow into adults with autism. The great strides we have made in understanding childhood autistic behaviors and interventions have lagged dramatically behind the needs of aging autistics. What of the young adult trying to build relationships? What of the middle aged autistic adult who has been misdiagnosed with Bipolar Disorder and lacks an effective treatment plan? What of the aging adult who is showing increasingly rigid autistic behaviors and is misdiagnosed as having frontotemporal dementia? Understanding Autism in Adults and Aging Adults is a one-of-a-kind resource designed to improve the correct diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder in adults. Filled with clinical stories that bring to life the concepts discussed, the book provides strategy-based interventions to address issues of personal and household management, medical care, communication, sensory processing symptoms, and emotional and behavioral regulation.

 

 

Award winning author, Lisa J. Shultz, is of the Baby Boomer generation and lost her father, age 89 in 2015. She embraces a challenging and often avoided topic of facing the end-of-life stage of a loved one. With courage, vulnerability and love, she recounts her dad's storied life, including its difficult ending. Wrought with what she felt was unnecessary suffering in for all involved at the end, she strives to help others find a more peaceful final chapter of life.

 

She begins her book by providing the background of her father, a World War II veteran. Their relationship was tenuous in Lisa's youth because she was disappointed and angered by his behavior, distancing herself from him and blaming him for the sudden end to their intact comfortable family life. As a young adult and after her father's sudden heart attack, Lisa was given a second chance to heal their relationship. Over the next three decades, they became closer, enjoying time together, including travel. When her dad entered his eighties, and while still raising her own children, Lisa found herself unprepared for his steady health decline. Suddenly, she was thrust into the role of overseeing his care as he began to experience increasing disability and the beginnings of dementia.

 

Not having prepared for or anticipated such a role, Lisa floundered as she attempted to address his ever-changing situation. The closeness and healing they had achieved was challenged as her father resisted conversations about his failing health and his care, exacerbated by a western medical system that fell short to prepare them for the end of his life.

 

After her father's death, Lisa began researching and compiling information aimed at educating and supporting others who may not be equipped for the challenges and decisions that arise when those we love begin to lose their health and mental clarity. The book also reminds us of our own mortality and inspires conversation and preparation to potentially ease the suffering for ourselves and those we leave behind.

 

A moving tribute to a remarkable man and a daughter's experience of losing her dad, A Chance to Say Goodbye gives rise to reflections about what is important in living and dying.