I guess we are all aging but we don't usually pay a great deal of attention to the subject. When it is our birthday, maybe especially on birthdays that include a zero, we are happy and proud to be old enough to join, leave, brag, or whatever.
The next book in the group I am going through is "The Art of Aging" by Sherwin Nuland. Nuland was a professor of surgery at Yale and he is the author of this book, and "How We Die", "How We Live" and many other books. I am using two Kindle readers to track through my collection of 40 recent purchases. Even though I planned to get through them all before buying anything more, I haven't.
I saw in a Goodreads email that a book called "Educated" was very popular. That didn't sound like a novel so I looked it up. Tara Westover was born in Idaho to a survivalist family which didn't believe in public schooling. Westover eventually got schooled and went on to obtain a PhD in history from Cambridge University in England, where she now lives. I bought "Educated" but it will not be released by Amazon until later in this month. I looked up Westover in Twitter and saw that she has praised a novel called "Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?". I bought that book, too. I have read a little of it and found that is a story that somewhat parallels Westover's life.
When I got back to the set of 40, I returned to "The Art of Aging." Following my own advice, I looked up Dr. Nuland. I thought I had read that he died and I was checking. He was born in 1930 and died in 2014. While looking that up, I found that Nuland made a couple of TED (https://www.ted.com/) talks. One of them is about how electric shock therapy saved his life. I have read the electric shock therapy has recently been quite improved so I was interested. Nuland was an expert in the history of medicine, ancient and recent both. TED talks usually include a transcript of what is said and a 22 minute talk like his can be read quickly instead of being watched and listened to.
Nuland was in his 30's when he fell into a deep and debilitating depression while going through a painful and nasty divorce. He explains in his talk where electric shock therapy came from and why. He didn't say anything much about improvements but it certainly helped him.
