Anti-Aging - Forward From Here: Leaving Middle Age--and Other Unexpected Adventures
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List Price: $24.00
Our Price: $5.75
Your Save: $ 18.25 ( 76% )
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Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.262
EAN: 9780743275118
ISBN: 074327511X
Label: Simon & Schuster
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 240
Publication Date: 2008-04-01
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Studio: Simon & Schuster
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Great read for anybody entering or passing through middle age!
Comment: I usually try to read at least one book per week and, also, listen
to one book on tape or CD . . . it was difficult to find the time to
do the listening while away, so this past week I instead managed
to read a second book . . . its review follows:
Turning sixty is something I can relate to, in that I'll be celebrating
that birthday next June.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh in FORWARD FROM HERE describes
how she went through a similar experience . . . as she enters
the period her mother once described as "the youth of old
age," the author details the many unexpected surprises
she has encountered.
Her observations were amusing at times, yet also
oh-so-insightful--such as this one:
* As I grew older and older, I got more used to the idea that death
would happen to everybody, including me, but that in my case it
would not happen for a very very very very long time. By the time it
happened, I hoped, I would be so old that it wouldn't bother me. This
is not quite true yet, but again, I think I may be getting there. I hope it
takes me a while longer. There's no need to rush.
As I journey on, I carry my lost loved ones with me: my sister, my mother,
and all the others. I have learned over the years that I can do this, that
love continues beyond loss. It continues not abstractly but intimately,
and it continues forever. My experience has also made me understand
that loss is inevitable, and that loss, too, continues forever, right along
with love.
I also liked what the author had to say about pets of all kinds . . . she
devotes two chapters to birds . . . however, it was this observation
about her dog that especially caught my attention:
* Many of our visitors, seeing that we had a dog, entered the house
with loud voices and waving hands, making a noisy fuss over him. This
kind of behavior just caused the poor dog to slink off into a corner
and stay there until the visitors left. Helen Wolff came in without
commotion and then sat quietly and drank her tea, like the well-behaved
guest that she was. The dog came over to greet her, eventually, sniffing
her hand and wagging his tail, probably grateful for her good manners. She
told me once that she felt it was better to let animals or children come
to her, if they wished to, rather than the other way around.
The part of FORWARD FROM HERE that most caught my attention
was Lindbergh's account of how she discovered thirty years after
the death of her father (famed aviator Charles Lindbergh) that
he had three secret families in Europe . . . upon this discovery,
she then went to meet them--discovering that her new extended
family was far more complicated than she had ever imagined.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A wonderful; book and thoroughly enjoyable
Comment: This is one of the best books that I've ever read. I've ordered others for my friends.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: WILL YOU, WON'T YOU?
Comment: FORWARD FROM HERE will delight you if:
--you remember with great fondness the writings of Reeve's mother, Anne Morrow. Making allowances for the generational differences, their styles and subjects are similar: family, nature, the written word per se, etc.
--you have read and enjoyed Reeve's other books. I found her UNDER A WING more tightly focused and thus, to me, more engaging; and NO MORE WORDS more frank and moving. But FORWARD FROM HERE has much of the charm of a lovely, simple dessert,what Anne Morrow Lindbergh called "something sweet at the end of the day." I was happy to have this book waiting at my bedside table for several nights, and only wished it a little longer.
--you are actively engaged in "moving forward" from 60-plus. The book deals honestly but cheerfully with a generous handful of the standard challenges of ageing. We are also offered time-tested insights on matters such as parenting, reading, writing, and modern drugs(pro and con).
--you want to know a bit about Reeve's reactions to her father Charles Lindbergh's three secret simultaneous mistresses and families. (The "Lone Eagle" indeed!) Of course this long-hidden aspect of Charles Lingbergh's otherwise much-celebrated life might well be the subject of a complete and probing book of its own, written not out of prurience but with the intent to better understand the puzzling psychological and emotional temperament involved. But Reeve Lindbergh will not, I think, be the one to write such a book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A pleasure to read
Comment: What a pleasure to read! I am not quite finished with this Kindle book and the more I read it, the more I'm enjoying it. Lindbergh is a sensitive, thoughtful, writer and I can relate to her experiences on so many levels. I, too, am a woman of a certain age, a mother, grandmother, potential (me, not her) writer. Her perspective on life, the natural world, her family just drew me in and I found myself wishing she were my friend.
Thank you, Reeve, for a lovely reading experience. I'm recommending this for all my friends and if they don't buy it, they're getting a copy for their birthdays or Christmas/Chanukah.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Getting Older, Getting Braver
Comment: Forward from Here is Reeve Lindbergh's best book yet. Funny, tender, compassionate, profound, Lindbergh reveals herself to be an accomplished and graceful writer--something you might already suspect if you have read her earlier books, Under a Wing (about growing up Lindbergh, with two extraordinary parents, Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh) and No More Words (about her mother's decline and death). In this book, Lindbergh (an author of books for children) explores the happiness and hazards she encounters as she journeys from middle age into her sixties--the "youth of old age." "I might as well enjoy the view as I travel along from my birth to death, inhabiting this being I call myself," she writes. "I may be a passenger on the journey, or I may be the vehicle itself, but I'm definitely not the driver. I'm here, but I'm not in charge."
Maybe, but she's not just along for the ride. In this collection of nineteen personal essays, she laughs at the pleasures of her rural Vermont life--the joys of reading, writing, raising lambs and boys and encountering turtles--and takes a sober look at the challenges of living in an aging body. The vanities of youth are gone (she quotes her beloved sister Anne, now dead of cancer: "After a certain age, there's only so good you can look.") and she is making "friends with reality." Not sure that she wants to wear purple, with a red hat that doesn't go, she looks back on a time when she wore lavender eyeshadow and white lipstick (do you remember doing that? I do) and laughs at herself. In fact, she knows that's the best thing to do: "laugh at myself when laughter is called for, weep when I need to, and feel all of it, every bit of it, as much as I can for as long as I can."
As far as feeling all of it goes, the most remarkable essay is the "Brain Tumor Diary," an account of the months (July 2006 through May 2007) when Lindbergh was dealing with a brain tumor--benign, thankfully, but large, intrusive, undeniably there, and needing to come out. It was a difficult time for her and her family. The saving graces were her writing and her focus on daily life: "Dailiness outlasts despair," she says. "For a while the rhythms of daily life may seem to be submerged, even drowned in disaster, but that is never true." The "Brain Tumor Diary" is a report from the front lines of daily life, lived in the face of possible disaster.
The Lindberghs are no strangers to life on the front lines and in the public eye. Reeve and her siblings have had to deal with as many as fifty men who have claimed to be the Lindbergh child kidnapped in 1932. But there is more, and in her final essay, she writes movingly about the way she felt when she learned that her father, the picture of rectitude, a "stern arbiter of moral and ethical conduct," had three secret European families and seven children. Indignation, anger, rage at her father's deception and hypocrisy, shame--it's all there. But in the end, there is compassion, and even humor:
I certainly could have done with his [my father's] endless lectures on the Population Explosion...A man who fathered thirteen--I think, I still have to stop and count us!--children, haranguing one of his daughters about world population figures? Give me a break!
And in the end, knowing her father to be at once "deeply intelligent and incredibly energetic," and "angry, restless, opinionated...obsessed with his own ideas and concerns," she has to admit that the multiple families made a certain kind of sense: "No one woman could possibly have lived with him all the time."
"I'm hoping that as I get older I'll get braver," Lindbergh writes at the close of this splendid and moving book. I'm hoping that Lindbergh will take us with her as she bravely explores her future, forward from here, and that soon we'll be able to read the next chapter of her journey.
by Susan Wittig Albert
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women
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Editorial Reviews:
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In her funny and wistful new book, Reeve Lindbergh contemplates entering a new stage in life, turning sixty, the period her mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, once described as "the youth of old age." It is a time of life, she writes, that produces some unexpected surprises. Age brings loss, but also love; disaster, but also delight. The second-graders Reeve taught many years ago are now middle-aged; her own children grow, marry, have children themselves. "Time flies," she observes, "but if I am willing to fly with it, then I can be airborne, too." A milestone birthday is also an opportunity to take stock of oneself, although such self-reflection may lead to nothing more than the realization, as Reeve puts it, "that I just seem to continue being me, the same person I was at twelve and at fifty." At sixty, as she observes, "all I really can do with the rest of my life is to...feel all of it, every bit of it, as much as I can for as long as I can." Age is only one of many subjects that Reeve writes about with perception and insight. In northern Vermont, nature is an integral part of daily life, especially on a farm. Whether it is the arrival and departure of certain birds in spring and fall, wandering turtles, or the springtime ritual of lambing, the natural world is a constant revelation. With a wry sense of humor, Reeve contemplates the infirmities of the aging body, as well as the many new drugs that treat these maladies. Briefly considering the risks of drug dependency, she writes that "the least we [the "Sixties Generation"] can do for ourselves is live up to our mythology, and take lots of drugs." Legal drugs, that is -- although what sustains us as we grow older is not drugs but an appreciation for life, augmented by compassion, a sense of humor, and common sense. And of course there is family -- especially with the Lindberghs. Reeve writes about discovering, thirty years after her father's death and two and a half years after her mother's, that her father had three secret families in Europe. She travels to meet them, learning to expand her self-understanding: "daughter of," "mother of," "sister of" -- sister of many more siblings than she'd known, in a family more complicated than even she had imagined. Forward from Here is a brave book, a reflective book, a funny book -- a book that will charm and fascinate anyone on the journey from middle age to the uncertain future that lies ahead.
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