Reviews

Book Reviewed: Addo Stuur – “Internet and E-mail for Seniors with Windows XP”

This book is a step-by-step instructions on the web, using search engines, sending and receiving email and downloading internet software.

The author supplements internet lessons with information on basic computer skills such as using a mouse (give me a break!). On the positive side, each chapter opens with an overview of the topics to be covered. Clear concise lessons on topics such as using a search engine and sending an email are provided via step-by-step instructions and accompanied by illustrations of what you will see on your computer screen. The lessons are followed by exercises, which allow the reader to test drive his or her new skills. Many of the lessons encourage you to explore these skills through the interactive and easy to use Visual Steps website. This is a very easy reading text and it is well organized.

I would not reccomend the book for a couple of reasons: (1) The book is seriously outdated. For example, the chapter on accessing the internet focuses on dial up modems. Not good. Most of the exercise are too simple minded for my tastes.

Reviewer: David

Book Reviews about Issues in Human Aging

From the NYTimes:  April 24, 2008: (Book Reviewer: Michelle Slatalla is a writer for the NY Times).

Book Reviewed: Dan Buettner - “Blue Zones”

MY neighbor Bruce has the healthiest lifestyle on the block. He eats small portions and skips dessert. He walks to work. His hobbies — coaching Little League, riding his bike and taking his dog on hikes — all involve getting wholesome, fresh air.

This behavior drives my husband, who has the least healthy lifestyle on the block, crazy. “You’re going to be so lonely living forever,” he yells at Bruce from our balcony, where we drink beer. “All the interesting people will be dead.”

“Yeah, good luck with that,” I chime in to show support for my husband (and Anchor Steam).

But secretly I’m on Bruce’s side. I wouldn’t mind living forever. Or at least long enough to blow out the candles on my 100th birthday cake.

Maybe I can. According to a new book that looks at the daily routines of clusters of centenarians who live in four geographically remote or culturally isolated “blue zones” of longevity — from Okinawa to a community of Seventh Day Adventists in Southern California — all I need to do to extend my life is follow a few of their simple secrets.

Eat less. Make family a priority. Banish stress. I figured it should be no problem to follow most of the common-sense tips that Dan Buettner outlines in “The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest” (National Geographic, 2008).

Of course, I was not going to be able to work a nightly glass of mugwort sake into my diet as easily as an Okinawan. Or spend the whole day hiking uphill like a Sardinian shepherd.

But maybe I could take advantage of the culturally isolated and geographically remote environment in which I live — my basement, in front of a computer — to create my own blue zone. I hoped, in fact, to find a way to obey the Power 9 — what Mr. Buettner nicknamed the rules of longevity — without ever getting up from my desk.

The first step was a cinch. Mr. Buettner recommends getting started by visiting www.bluezones.com to take a test called the Vitality Compass. Answer 35 questions, and voilà, it calculates your life expectancy.

I felt healthier already. Two minutes later, I received (sort of) good news.

“You are in the Blue Zone!” the Web site told me, adding that my biological age is 40, which is better than both my real age (46) and my Wii Fit age (49), but not nearly as young as the age I would like to look (23).

But then the results took a dark turn.

My life expectancy: 95.2.

My healthy life expectancy: 83.9.

While 12 years of decline was bad news for me, it would be even more of a blow to my children, who already have been warned that they won’t inherit my jewelry if they put me in a nursing home.

The only way to react to such dark news was to scoff at it, and dismiss the quiz as a publicity stunt to sell books.

Sadly, however, it turned out that the quiz results were based on a complex, 106-page algorithm developed by Dr. Robert Kane, a physician and a professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health.

“What the results tell you are a confirmation and a consolidation of what’s been known, for the most part,” for decades, Dr. Kane said in an interview. “The challenge now is to try to get people to use it to change behavior. Most of us know what we ought to do, but have a hard time doing it.”

Like me. If I followed all the personalized advice in the quiz’s final report, I could get as much as an extra 2.3 years — if I didn’t get struck by lightning or some unforeseen fatal disease. But even knowing that incentive, I suffered an immediate setback. Two suggestions — get more rigorous exercise and eat less — made me hungry.

A few Mint Milano cookies later, I returned to my desk determined to improve. I e-mailed my tennis doubles partner, Stacey (who is also studying to become a certified personal trainer), to volunteer to let her train me twice during the next week.

She wrote back, with suggested training sessions and gossip about the latest team scandals, which sidetracked me until my fingers had gotten such a rigorous typing “workout” that I was ready to move on to the next suggestion: avoid salt.

To accomplish this, I sat at my desk awhile, eating nothing, until I figured enough time had passed to allow me to check off the no-salt suggestion.

Next: eat more fruit.

A Google search for salty fruit yielded 456,000 results. I settled quickly on something delicious called Sweet-n-Salty Fruit-n-Nut Honey Lace Brittle. Was that so hard?

After printing out the recipe, I moved on to the next suggestion: drink red wine.

Here — while people who know me might find this hard to believe — I hit a roadblock. While it’s possible, sometimes even essential, to drink wine in front of my computer, I couldn’t imagine myself drinking red.

Seeking clarification, I phoned Mr. Buettner. “Do you really think some book is going to get me to give up white wine?” I asked.

“No, no, you don’t have to,” he said in a reassuring tone meant to lower my stress level (another suggestion from my final report). “When it comes to drinking any spirits, a woman should have a drink a day and maybe two, unless pregnant.”

“Any spirits?” I pressed.

“You get this extra little antioxidant bump” from the polyphenols in red wine, he explained. “But white wine is fine too. I know drinking alcohol helps because I looked at epidemiology studies of huge populations and saw that those who drink a little outlive those who don’t.”

No doubt because nothing reduces stress like a full glass of chardonnay. And I needed relaxation more than ever because Mr. Buettner had become part of the problem. “I’m feeling considerable stress,” I told him, “because, according to your quiz, I am not going to live to be 100.”

“You have to have won the genetic lottery to live that long,” he said. “Like, did your grandparents and all their siblings live to be 100?”

I considered. Perhaps all four grandparents combined reached that age. My only option was to tackle another of the Power 9.

“I am thinking of trying to be more likable, as page 259 of your book suggests,” I said. “But how does that help?”

“If you’re likable, you’re likely to have a better social network, and even get better health care at the doctor’s office because the people who take your blood pressure will do a better job,” he said.

Pray tell, how to become more likable? “Be interested, not just interesting,” he said. “Likable people tend to ask you a question about yourself instead of just talking about themselves.”

Taking his advice, I changed my Facebook status to say, “Michelle is wondering what YOU are thinking.”

This prompted a Facebook friend to write a post: “Funny you should ask. …”

Encouraged by how youthful my newfound amiability made me feel, I sent a text message to my Twitter entourage that said, “I meant to mention earlier, you look really good today.”

No response. So I texted, “Did you change your hair or what?”

This backfired. One of my Twitter-hating teenagers texted, “Do you realize that everyone can see what you’re typing?”

In desperation, I was ready to take the final bit of Mr. Buettner’s advice (“Maybe you should minimize time spent on the Internet as a way to reduce stress”) and spend some quality offline time “surrounded by those who share your blue-zone values.”

So I made a pan of calorie-laden chicken tetrazzini and went across the street to Bruce’s house with it. There my husband and I found him poring over the score sheet from a Little League game (his team won 20-5, which had to have diminished his stress).

“That looks good,” Bruce said, pointing to the casserole.

“Try some,” I said.

He had seconds. I didn’t.

——————————

From the NYTimes, July 30, 2010: (Book Reviewer: Abraham Verghese is a professor and senior associate chairman in the department of internal medicine at Stanford University).

Book Reviewed: Jonathan Weiner – “Not long for this world”

In his new book, “Long for This World,” Weiner makes similar use of another brilliant theoretical scientist, the English gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, a tireless proselytizer for radical life extension…de Grey emerges on the page as someone who can be taken only in small doses. “Medievally thin and pale,” as Weiner puts it, with a luxuriant beard that recalls “Father Time before his hair turned gray” or “Timothy Leary unbound,” he is given to provocative statements that can turn into sermons. Nevertheless, with de Grey as his main character, Weiner explores the fractured, fuzzy science and pseudoscience of immortality.

“This is a good time to be a mortal,” Weiner writes, noting that life expectancy in the developed world is about 80 years, and improving. Yet evolution has equipped us with bodies and instincts designed only to get us to a reproductive age and not beyond. “We get old because our ancestors died young,” Weiner writes. “We get old because old age had so little weight in the scales of evolution; because there were never enough Old Ones around to count for much in the scales.” The first half of life is orderly, a miracle of “detailed harmonious unfolding” beginning with the embryo. What comes after our reproductive years is “more like the random crumpling of what had been neatly folded origami, or the erosion of stone. The withering of the roses in the bowl is as drunken and disorderly as their blossoming was regular and precise.”

De Grey, in the vernacular of science, is a “skin out” person, someone who studies life whole. Naturalists, ecologists, field biologists and evolutionary biologists are in this category, whereas “skin in” people pursue cellular phenomena, “gadgets and widgets that are too small to see through a microscope,” Weiner writes. The dichotomy is captured in Francis Crick’s scolding of Stephen Jay Gould: “The trouble with you evolutionary biologists is that you are always asking ‘why’ before you understand ‘how.’ ” As Weiner describes it, the inspiration for de Grey’s scientific quest for immortality came in a flash one sleepless night: “The evolutionary theory of aging predicts chaos. And chaos is just what you see at the cellular and molecular level, and what you will always see. But what these troubles all have in common is that they fill the aging body with junk. Maybe we can just clean up all the scree and rubble that gathers in our aging bodies.” The beauty of this view is that “curing” aging requires no special knowledge of design, or any understanding of just how the cellular junk got there in the first place. It only requires that we get rid of it.

As de Grey sees it, there are seven types of cellular junk, the gerontological equivalent of the seven deadly sins. They include “cross links” that gum up the machinery and glue cells to one another and mitochondria that fail with age. Then there is junk within cells and junk in the spaces between cells, along with cells that no longer work but hang around and cells that die and poison cells around them. And then there are old cells that acquire dangerous mutations and give rise to cancer. Weiner’s strength as a writer is his ability to flesh out these complex theories without losing the reader. De Grey’s dream of conquering death may seem far-fetched and unreal, but Big Pharma is already at work on some of these ideas — the first cream that overcomes cross-links, which cause our skin to stiffen and wrinkle, will be a blockbuster.

Fortunately, “Long for This World” is not all about Aubrey de Grey. Weiner writes engagingly about other researchers and their work in the field: on so-called Methuselah mutants, creatures that live much longer than the rest of their species; genes like Sir2 (Silent Information Regulator 2), which may be responsible for some of the life-extending effects of extremely calorie-restricted diets; and related proteins, known as sirtuins. That work led to the discovery of resveratrol, a compound in the skin of grapes that can activate sirtuins and prolong a lab animal’s life.

But as Weiner points out, there is a big problem with immortality. Traditionally, we have viewed our lives as unfolding in stages: Shakespeare’s seven ages of man capture our progression from infant to schoolboy to lover to soldier to justice to clown, ending finally in “second childishness and mere oblivion; sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” Immortality could wind up being a terrible stasis. “A huge part of the action and the drama in the seven ages comes from the sense of an ending, the knowledge that all these ages must have an end,” Weiner writes. We might live forever in a state of unending boredom. And the technology might benefit the wrong people: “If biologists could have done for the dictators of the 20th century what they can now do for roundworms and flies — double their life span — then Mao Zedong might still be alive.”

As a young physician caught up in the early years of the H.I.V. epidemic, I was struck by my patients’ will to live, even as their quality of life became miserable and when loved ones and caregivers would urge the patient to let go. I thought it remarkable that patients never asked me to help end their lives (and found it strange that Dr. Kevorkian managed to encounter so many who did). My patients were dying young and felt cheated out of their best years. They did not want immortality, just the chance to live the life span that their peers could expect. What de Grey and other immortalists seem to have lost sight of is that simply living a full life span is a laudable goal. Partial success in extending life might simply extend the years of infirmity and suffering — something that to some degree is already happening in the West.

Weiner brings his insightful book to a close with this thought: “The trouble with immortality is endless. The thought of it brings us into contact with problems of time itself — with shapeless problems we have never grasped and may never put into words. Our ability to exist in time may require our being mortal, although we can’t understand that any more than the fish can understand water. What we call the stream of consciousness may depend upon mortality in ways that we can hardly glimpse.”

Even if writers become immortal, books must end, and it is by reaching the end that the reader can sit back and find meaning in the journey. “Long for This World” is a great trip.