Fresco BookShop at TrueFresco Art Network: All Books: The Third Chapter: Passion, Risk, and Adventure in the 25 Years After 50

In the twenty-first century, a developmental phase of life is emerging as significant and distinct, capturing our interest, engaging our curiosity, and expanding our understanding of human potential and development. Demographers talk about this new chapter in life as characterized by people—between fifty and seventy-five—who are considered “neither young nor old.” In our “third chapters” we are beginning to redefine our views about the casualties and opportunities of aging; we are challenging cultural definitions of strength, maturity, power, and sexiness.

This is a chapter in life when the traditional norms, rules, and rituals of our careers seem less encompassing and restrictive; when many women and men seem to be embracing new challenges and searching for greater meaning in life.

In The Third Chapter, the renowned sociologist Dr. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot offers a strong counterpoint to the murky ambivalence that shrouds our clear view of people in their third chapters. She challenges the still prevailing and anachronistic images of aging by documenting and revealing the ways in which the years between fifty and seventy-five may, in fact, be the most transformative and generative time in our lives, tracing the ways in which wisdom, experience, and new learning inspire individual growth and cultural transformation. The women and men whose voices fill the pages of The Third Chapter tell passionate and poignant stories of risk and vulnerability, failure and resilience, challenge and mastery, experimentation and improvisation, and insight and new learning.

"Insightful vignettes of people navigating the squirrelly years between 50 and 70. Lawrence-Lightfoot profiles 40 individuals who had, by one measure or another, successful working lives and then took a new tack after age 50—voluntarily or not. They may be educated and financially secure, but they are also fragile and assailable in ways they haven't experienced for many years as they make their way over foreign ground. They frequently find it discomfiting to be scrutinizing their identities and seeking to align their values with their actions, notes the author: 'Something in us feels we are being irresponsible, or inappropriate, or maybe even unseemly, when we admit our lust for new learning,' especially when society assumes it's time for them to be put out to pasture. Lawrence-Lightfoot's investigation is anything but a dry, academic study. Her voice is by turns thoughtful, soothing and plaintive, as well as hungry for understanding what does and doesn't work for these pilgrims. Standardized educational formats aren't much help, she discovers; 'school values and practices may distort organic learning across the life span, compromising and masking the impulses that might makes us productive and skirmishes with the new, including a lot of inefficiency and circling. (Happily, readers also learn that 'old burdens become lighter.') Tension, strangely enough, may prove crucial—not the kind of tension that leads to stress, but the kind that demands reconciliation between opposing forces or the charting of new scenarios by confronting ancient traumas. Other qualities worth having in your quiver; 'openness, fearlessness, humility, and [the] capacity to look foolish.' It helps to be surrounded by a caring society—which is either the good news or the bad news, depending on your reservoir of another helpful virtue: hope. Heady, fruitful explorations of ill-charted terrain destined for a population explosion."—Kirkus Reviews