In Our Prime: The Invention of Middle Age
Patricia Cohen
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 1416572899
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
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Changing, as did the duration of their success. Effects could dissipate in four to six months, he admitted. By 1926, an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association declared Voronoff’s transplants to be useless and possibly harmful. His tales of miraculous rejuvenations continued to fascinate the public, though, influencing the popular imagination far beyond the actual number of surgeries or successes. Voronoff kept at it, telling an interviewer in 1939 that in the twenty years that.
Middle age. He was born in 1923 in Elmira, a small town in the northeastern part of New York, the baby of the family and the first boy after three girls. He enrolled at Yale, but left in 1943 when World War II spread to America’s shores to join the air force and fly B-24s, the cumbersome long-range bombers. Brim, lean with white hair, paused for a moment as he remembered his days soaring over the Pacific more than sixty-five years ago. “Sometimes you look back at your different selves,” he said,.
Take on the responsibility and I complete it, which is the reason, for instance, why I have stuck with being treasurer at church,” said one college-educated respondent. These definitions of social responsibility reveal a sense of self-entitlement among the college-educated group, who groused about interferences with their own happiness and their ability to control what happens in their lives. Underneath many of the answers lay the assumption that taking care of others depended on taking care of.
Years. One brain study was led by Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin. His research was the reason that I had traveled to Madison and lay inside an fMRI machine on that sweltering summer day discussed in chapter two. Davidson was interested in exploring the mind’s inner workings to discover the links between emotional resilience and health. What he refers to as “affective style”—the various ways in which people respond to significant.
Clinical improvement” that included a marked increase in the “sex urge and in the capacity to respond with proper emotions not only to intercourse but also to other acts such as kissing or embracing.” The culture found inspiration in the news. An issue of the science-fiction magazine Amazing Stories featured Gland Superman, a regular guy enhanced by hormones. Satirizing the hormone mania, Ray Bourbon, a gay performer, released a record in 1941 called Gland Opera: Ain’t science marvelous, ain’t.