About this ebook
A Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s “touching, funny and inspiring” true story of daily life in a New England nursing home (The New York Times).
Ninety-year-old Lou quit school after the eighth grade, worked for the rest of his life, and stayed with the same woman for nearly seventy years. Seventy-two-year-old Joe was chief probation officer in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, holds a law degree, and has faced the death of a son and the raising of a mentally challenged daughter. Now, the two men are roommates in a nursing home. Despite coming from very different backgrounds, the two become close friends.
Focusing on these two men as well as introducing us to the other aging residents of Linda Manor in Northampton, Massachusetts, literary journalist Tracy Kidder examines the sorrows and joys of growing older and the universal struggle to find meaning in the face of mortality. From the New York Times–bestselling author and National Book Award–winning author of The Soul of a New Machine, this is an extraordinary look inside an often-hidden world.
“As in his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Soul of a New Machine, House, and the best-selling Among Schoolchildren, Kidder reveals his extraordinary talent as a storyteller by taking the potentially unpalatable subject of life in a nursing home and making it into a highly readable, engrossing account.” —Library Journal
“Rich detail and true-to-the-ear dialogue let the brave and determined elderly speak for themselves—and for the continually surprising potential of the human spirit.” —Kirkus Reviews
Ninety-year-old Lou quit school after the eighth grade, worked for the rest of his life, and stayed with the same woman for nearly seventy years. Seventy-two-year-old Joe was chief probation officer in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, holds a law degree, and has faced the death of a son and the raising of a mentally challenged daughter. Now, the two men are roommates in a nursing home. Despite coming from very different backgrounds, the two become close friends.
Focusing on these two men as well as introducing us to the other aging residents of Linda Manor in Northampton, Massachusetts, literary journalist Tracy Kidder examines the sorrows and joys of growing older and the universal struggle to find meaning in the face of mortality. From the New York Times–bestselling author and National Book Award–winning author of The Soul of a New Machine, this is an extraordinary look inside an often-hidden world.
“As in his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Soul of a New Machine, House, and the best-selling Among Schoolchildren, Kidder reveals his extraordinary talent as a storyteller by taking the potentially unpalatable subject of life in a nursing home and making it into a highly readable, engrossing account.” —Library Journal
“Rich detail and true-to-the-ear dialogue let the brave and determined elderly speak for themselves—and for the continually surprising potential of the human spirit.” —Kirkus Reviews
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4.5
2 reviews
Anil Das
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May 3, 2021
AÀA BOSS NETWORK
About the author
Author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning 1981 nonfiction book The Soul of a New Machine, detailing the development of the first computers at Data General Corporation, Tracy Kidder is a bestselling literary journalist and Harvard graduate with an MFA from the University of Iowa. He has written several other nonfiction works that have received critical acclaim, including The Road to Yuba City: A Journey Into the Juan Corona Murders; Strength in What Remains, the account of a man who survived the Burundi genocide; and Mountains Beyond Mountains, a biography of physician, anthropologist, and humanitarian Paul Farmer. He was the first A.M. Rosenthal Writer-in-Residence at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy in 2010.
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