Mastics-Moriches-Shirley Community Library Reader Advisory Blog: middle aged persons

Showing posts with label middle aged persons. Show all posts

Book to Movie Alert!

Another movie based on a Nicholas Sparks' book is getting ready to hit the silver screen on October 17th. The Best of Me stars James Marsden and Michelle Monaghan and is a story of two small-town former high school sweethearts from opposite sides of the tracks. Now middle-aged, they have taken wildly divergent paths, but neither has lived the life they imagined, and neither can forget the passionate first love that forever altered their world.

View the office movie trailer below!

Read the book before you see the movie! Click here to place your hold today!

Cutting Teeth by Julia Fierro

An unlikely group of parents and children from New York City vacation together at a beach house on Long Island over Labor Day weekend in Cutting Teeth by Julia Fierro. Friendships crumble and alliances break as the characters try to keep their insecurities and oddities at bay. The book covers all of the complex dilemmas that modern day urban families face these days, from romance and friendship to parenting and class tension to wondering...is this as good as it gets?

"Fierro's first novel captures the complexity of forging new friendships and redefining lives as contemporary parents. Although largely unsympathetic, her characters are meticulously drawn, the situations emotionally charged. Readers, especially young parents, won't be able to look away from the train wreck of urban family dysfunction on display here." (Booklist Reviews)

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

Genre: Adult Non-Fiction
Rating: 5 out of 5

"Being Mortal is about the limitations of what modern medicine can provide for people as their lives draw to a close. Gawande argues that the objective of medicine should not merely be treatment and survival; medical care should also ensure dignity in death and having control over one's final moments. He argues that instead of aggressively fighting the inescapable realities of aging, we should ask the hard questions of ourselves and our loved ones -- What makes life worth living? When should we try to extend our lives, and when should we choose a better quality of our remaining days over extending their quantity?

This book is difficult to read. Not because of the way Gawande writes -- his style is highly engaging, and he never lapses into excessively scientific jargon or overly simplistic explanations -- but because of the tough subject matter. Gawande draws on his own experiences as a doctor and peppers his book with honest and humane stories of his patients, friends, and family; the stories he tells make the book more accessible, and also more heartbreaking. (And that's not a bad thing.)

No one likes to think about their loved ones', or their own, impending mortality. But it's important to have these hard conversations, because as Gawande says, "endings matter." - Amanda