Sixty : a diary of my sixty-first year : the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning? / Ian Brown.
Material type:
TextPublisher: New York : The Experiment, 2016Copyright date: ©2016Description: xi, 299 pages ; 22 cmContent type: - text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9781615193509
- 1615193502
| Item type | Home library | Collection | Call number | Materials specified | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Adult Book
|
Main Library | Biography | Brown, I. B878 | Available | 33111008458180 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
As Ian Brown's sixtieth birthday loomed, every moment seemed to present a choice: Confront, or deny, the biological fact that the end was now closer than the beginning. True, he was beginning to notice memory lapses, creaking knees, and a certain social invisibility--and yet, it troubled him that many people think of sixty as "old," because he rarely felt older than at forty.
An award-winning writer, Brown instead chose to notice every moment, try to understand it, capture it . . . all without panicking. Sixty is the result: Brown's uncensored account of his sixty-first year, and, informed by his reportorial gifts, his investigation of the many changes--physical, mental, and emotional--that come to all of us as we age.
Brown is a master of the seriocomic, and his day-to-day dramas--as a husband, father, brother, son, friend, and neighbor--are rendered, inseparably, with wistfulness and laugh-out-loud wit. He is also a discerning, prolific reader, and it is a pure pleasure being privy to his thoughts on the dozens of writers--including Virginia Woolf, Philip Larkin, A. J. Liebling, Wislawa Szymborska, Clive James, Sharon Olds, and Karl Ove Knausgaard--who speak to him most, at sixty.
From an author on whom the telling detail is never lost, Sixty is a richly informative, candid report from the line between middle-aged and soon-to-be-elderly. It perfectly captures the obsessions of a generation realizing that they are no longer young.
"Originally published in Canada by Random House Canada in 2015"--Title page verso.
"Ian Brown began keeping a diary of his sixty-first year with a Facebook post on the morning of February 4, 2014, his sixtieth birthday. As well as wanting to maintain a running tally on how he survived the year, Brown set out to explore what being sixty means physically, psychologically, and intellectually. 'What pleasures are gone forever? Which ones, if any, are left? What did Beethoven, or Schubert, or Jagger, or Henry Moore, or Lucian Freud do after they turned sixty?' And more importantly, 'How much life can you live in the fourth quarter, not knowing when the game might end?'"--Provided by publisher.
"From the author of the award-winning The Boy in the Moon comes a wickedly honest and brutally funny account of the year in which Ian Brown truly realized that the man in the mirror was actually...sixty. Sixty is a report from the front, a dispatch from the Maginot Line that divides the middle-aged from the soon to be elderly. As Ian writes, 'It is the age when the body begins to dominate the mind, or vice versa, when time begins to disappear and loom, but never in a good way, when you have no choice but to admit that people have stopped looking your way, and that in fact they stopped twenty years ago.' Ian began keeping a diary with a Facebook post on the morning of February 4, 2014, his sixtieth birthday. As well as keeping a running tally on how he survived the year, Ian explored what being sixty means physically, psychologically and intellectually. 'What pleasures are gone forever? Which ones, if any, are left? What did Beethoven, or Schubert, or Jagger, or Henry Moore, or Lucien Freud do after they turned sixty?' And most importantly, 'How much life can you live in the fourth quarter, not knowing when the game might end?' With formidable candour, he tries to answer this question: 'Does aging and elderliness deserve to be dreaded--and how much of that dread can be held at bay by a reasonable human being?' For that matter, for a man of sixty, what even constitutes reasonableness?"--Amazon.com.