The Gerontologist Advance Access originally published online on October 27, 2009
The Gerontologist 2009 49(6):856-859; doi:10.1093/geront/gnp146
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.
The Search for Meaning in Later Life
Director, Office of Academic Affairs, AARP, 601 E Street, NW, Washington, DC 20049
Guttmann, D. (2008). Finding Meaning in Life, at Midlife and Beyond: Wisdom and Spirit From Logotherapy. New York, Praeger Publishers. 192 pages. $39.95 (hardcover).
Shneidman, E. (2009). A Commonsense Book of Death: Reflections at Ninety of a Lifelong Thanatologist. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 191 pages. $39.95 (hardcover).
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Shneidman (1973), author of A Commonsense Book of Death, died shortly before the raucous health care reform debate in the summer of 2009. In town hall meetings around the United States, there were hysterical cries of "Euthanasia!" at the very idea that Medicare might reimburse health professionals just for talking to patients about end-of-life decisions (what horror!). It was a bit of a shock. We might have imagined that in "postmodern" America, we had become accustomed to hearing almost everything talked about in public. But that was an illusion. As we witnessed in the uproar over Terri Ann Schiavo a few years earlier, baseless allegations about "death panels" proved just how difficult it had become to talk "commonsense" about death in America. But Edwin Shneidman has tried to do just that, and his contribution is worth reading.
The book is a personal statement as much as an exercise