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May is Older American’s Month: Five essential reads for people of any age. Yes, you!
May is Older Americans Month, called Senior Citizens Month when President John Kennedy declared it in 1963. There’s not even a definitive name or universal definition to describe the very people we’re commemorating. “Flip the Script on Aging” is the 2025 Older Americans Month theme. The five books below, free with your library card, do do exactly that. They challenge us to find the right words, attitudes, policies and systems, because in the end (literally), our lives depend on it. Half of today’s newborns might live to 95, so how we think, speak and act today will become more urgent tomorrow.
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Life Gets Better by Wendy Lustbader
“The myth of youth as the best time of life burdens the young and makes us all dread getting older,” writes Wendy Lustbader, a social worker and psychotherapist who has spent three decades listening to the stories of older people. Her book offers a beautifully written, carefully observed antidote to that dread. She has seen how physical loss in old age comes with the freedom to cherish what you still can do. Insights emerge with the passage of time. Anger fades. Gratitude grows. “As our bloated opinion of ourselves deflates, our well-being expands,” she writes. “Life gets so much lighter.”
Breaking the Age Code by Becca Levy
Yale University professor Becca Levy’s research says be careful what you think; your ageist stereotypes could kill you. “Most people don’t realize they hold preconceptions about aging,” she writes. “Unfortunately, most of the world’s prevailing cultural age beliefs today are negative.” In fact, she says, the World Health Organization calls ageism the world’s most “socially accepted prejudice.” Her work, corroborated by hundreds of studies worldwide, suggests people with ageist beliefs suffer worse health outcomes than people with positive attitudes. Fortunately, she says, beliefs are malleable. She proposes an “age liberation movement” and offers tips on how to free your mind.
Being Mortal by Atul Gawande
Atul Gawande’s acclaimed exploration of mortality shows that there are, in fact, reasons to dread aging. A surgeon, Harvard professor and staff writer for the New Yorker, Gawande lays bare how American doctors and institutions have turned our final moments into “a life designed to be safe but empty of anything we care about.” They don’t even ask what’s important. Without downplaying the messiness and heartache of the end-of-life experience, Gawande compellingly shows that “we have the opportunity to fashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone’s lives.”
The Longevity Imperative by Andrew J. Scott
To riff on the comic strip character Pogo’s famous quip: We have met the elderly, and he is us. Andrew Scott brings an economist’s eye to a plausible future, where greater longevity means “the young can for the first time in human history expect to become the very old.” Scott envisions a “longevity dividend,” where people live not just longer but better and proposes an “evergreen agenda” that revolutionizes how we get there. “If we are going to live to our tenth or even eleventh decade,” he writes, “we cannot simply cross our fingers and hope that all ends well."
This Chair Rocks by Ashton Applewhite
In How to Be an Anti-Racist, Ibram Kendi talks about prevailing racist stereotypes he absorbed as a child. Ashton Applewhite, in her “manifesto against ageism,” describes how ads, movies and other cultural forces prejudiced her against her “own, future self.” We celebrate change until middle age, she says, after which “agelessness” becomes the gold standard. This Chair Rocks calls for people of all ages to join an “age pride” movement. “We all wake up a day older, and one of these days, we won’t wake up at all,” she writes. “The sooner we accept that, the better off we’ll be.”
About the Author
Barbara Cornell is a Library Associate at the William O. Lockridge Bellevue Neighborhood Library. She grew up in Michigan, where the public library across the street from her house was a first taste of independence. Since then, she has lived in five countries and always finds a home in books. She has two grown sons and lives with her husband in Washington, DC.