In Our Prime, Patricia Cohen
In Our Prime, Patricia Cohen
List: $17.99 | Sale: $12.59
Club: $8.99

In Our Prime
The Invention of Middle Age

Author: Patricia Cohen

Narrator: Pam Ward

Unabridged: 10 hr 18 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 01/23/2012


Synopsis

From the New York Times reporter whose beat is culture and ideas
comes a fascinating, revelatory, and timely social history of the
concept of middle age. For the first time ever, the middle-aged make up
the biggest, richest, and most influential segment of the country, yet
the history of middle age has remained largely untold. This important
and immensely readable book finally fills the gap.

In Our Prime is
a biography of the idea of middle age from its invention in the late
nineteenth century to its current place at the center of American
society, where it shapes the way we view our families, our professional
obligations, and our inner lives. Patricia Cohen ranges over the entire
landscape of midlife, exploring how its biological, psychological, and
social definitions have shifted from one generation to the next. Middle
age has been a symbol both of decline and of power and wealth.
Explaining why, Cohen takes readers from early-twentieth-century
factories that refused to hire middle-aged men to twenty-first-century
high-tech laboratories where researchers are currently conducting
cutting-edge experiments on the middle-aged brain and body.

About Patricia Cohen

Patricia Cohen is a New York Times reporter covering culture and ideas. She has also worked at Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, and New York Newsday. Her work has been included in the writing textbook The Longman Writer, and she is a contributor to the four-volume series The New York Times Guide to the Arts of the 20th Century.


Reviews

Goodreads review by John

I was in the mood for a human interest, social commentary, look-at-ourselves book. This 2012 work by Patricia Cohen fit the bill. I liked it. I refuse to get into any game of "when is middle age?" The author dances around the question for parts of several chapters. I feel the best answer is that the......more

Goodreads review by Jenny

I have to agree with other reviewers who found nothing new in this book. It does a good job of documenting how advertisers create anxieties to get middle aged people to buy products but this is not exactly news. Much of the first part which purports to give a historical overview of the concept of mi......more

Goodreads review by Kathy

i'm marking this read but don't think i'll actually make it all the way through. Maybe i'm just too stuck in my storytelling preferences. While i found the premise very interesting (being a middle ager myself), I found the book dry, the message overwhelmed by the cited references. There's nothing in......more

The term “middle age” is an invention of our modern world and the definition changes according to the normal expected life span of adults. In generations when 60 year-olds were considered well-aged; middle age, by definition, would have been 30. Slowly the starting point for middle age progressed an......more

Goodreads review by Ciara

i read an excerpt from this book somewhere & found myself sufficiently intrigued to check it out of the library. i like to read about the history of how things we take for granted (like teenagerhood, or middle age) was actually manufactured, usually by companies trying to convince us to buy stuff. t......more