Aging: An Apprenticeship…book review

by Richard Subber | Apr 24, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Reflections

it’s not the last obscenity…

Book review:

Aging: An Apprenticeship

Nan Narboe, ed.

Portland, OR: Red Notebook Press, 2018

286 pages

Narboe creates a handy and wide-ranging collection of reflections on the art, science, and humanity of the aging process. More than 50 authors tell it like they think it is, for folks nearing the increasingly ordinary age of 50, and for folks in their 50s, 60s, 70s , 80s, and 90s and beyond. If you’re not in one of those groups, you will be sooner than you think.

Of course, the explicit premise of most of the authors in Aging: An Apprenticeship is that life can be good (or not), aging happens to everyone, and dying is the end game.

Gloria Steinem’s contribution is on point, completely tolerable, and instructive. She says:

“After all, we are communal creatures who must mirror each other to know who we are. Every living thing ages and dies, yet humans seem to be the only species that thinks about aging and thinks about dying. Surely, we are meant to use this ability, especially in a country that suffers so much from concealing aging and dying as if they were the last obscenities.”

For Aging: An Apprenticeship, Narboe collects essays that range from whimsical to doggone serious. Each author offers a very personal argument that aging and dying are 100% natural.

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Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 73 free verse poems,

and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)

and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”