“An instant classic!”
I’ve been a practicing psychiatrist for more than fifty years, during which time I’ve seen more patients than I can count. But for every one of them I’ve helped, there’s another thousand I could have. So I wrote “The Myth of Aging” to give me the opportunity to help those I couldn’t see in a lifetime of office visits.
Arnold Gilberg MD
That encapsulates Dr. Arnold Gilberg’s mission statement when he sat down to write THE MYTH OF AGING: A Prescription for Emotional and Physical Health. And, based on the book’s forty-three topics divided over seven sections, he not only meets that bar, he exceeds it by leaps and bounds.
Gilberg is the first to admit that aging is no myth—the mythology lies more in how we age. The author himself is closing in on ninety years old and is still seeing patients, became an ordained rabbi at the age of eighty, and, oh yeah, wrote a bestseller that offers sage advice for a life better lived and enjoyed. In fact, THE MYTH OF AGING stands alone in the crowded field of psychological self-help entries in its encyclopedic curation of life issues almost all us have faced, will face, or are facing.
The chapter-sized topics include universal maladies like “Coping with Loneliness,” “Dealing with Change,” “Financial Setbacks,” and “Overcoming Grief.” And Gilberg doesn’t just analyze the problem. He finishes each chapter with a bullet-pointed listicle that serves up prescriptive wisdom accumulated over sixty years in practice seeing thousands of patients.
There isn’t a lot new or earth-shattering here. What is new, and earth-shattering, is having it in a single volume. There truly is something for everyone here to the point where you very well might choose not to read THE MYTH OF AGING cover-to-cover. Instead, you may start by perusing the table of contents and paging ahead to those topics most relevant to what you’re facing at the time. But who knows what tomorrow brings, right? So make sure to keep your copy handy. I’d say on the coffee table, except the book is a bit slight of heft for such placement.
Among the specific myths of aging, one of my favorites is the notion of the value older people place on themselves and their lives. Gilberg is quick to raise the proverbial notion that it’s not the years in your life, but the life in your years—actually, he stresses that quality as well as quantity, to a great extent, is up to us. Our diets, our exercise regimens, our interests, the communities we build for ourselves comprise a few of the factors that determine whether our golden years are just that, and not merely silver or bronze. And for Gilberg one of paramount keys to a healthy mind is similarly healthy body and spirit. He has always maintained a holistic approach to his practice. That is much reflected in THE MYTH OF AGING, thanks to which the doctor is now always in.
When I was a little tyke myself, my mother double-checked “Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care” often enough to grind the pages to pulp. And when I came into my teen years I did the same with David Reuben’s “Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex: But Were Afraid to Ask.” Today, the same baby boomers who devoured that prescriptive tome have a sequel of sorts to feast on.
Call THE MYTH OF AGING “Everything You Wanted to Know About Life: But Couldn’t Find,” because it answers pretty much any question you’ve got about dealing with those nasty bumps in the road we’re all traveling along. An instant classic and once-in-a-lifetime treatise on (self) improving the human condition.
