Passages
and
New Passages
(The following reviews are taken from the author's website. Click on Gail Sheehy's name to go to her website)
Passages (I read Passages back in the early 1980s)
The years between 18 and 50 are the center of life, a time of growth and opportunity. But until now no guide has existed to help us understand the mysterious process by which we become adults.
Studies of child development have plotted every nuance of growth and given us comforting labels such as the "Terrible Twos" and the "Noisy Nines." Yet what Gesell and Spock did for children hasn’t been done for us adults. Whenever psychologists do address themselves to adult life, it is in terms of its "problems" – rarely from the perspective of continuing changes through the life cycle. But now a new concept of adult development has begun to emerge.
Gail Sheehy, an author those investigative reporting has won numerous prizes, set herself three objectives in writing this pioneering book: to locate the personality changes common to each stage of life; to compare the developmental rhythms of men and women – which she found strikingly unsynchronized; and, in light of this, to examine the crises that couples can anticipate. Which passages cause one partner to put an extra strain on the other? How do their needs and drams change with age?
Drawing on three years of painstaking research and 115 in-depth interviews, Gail Sheehy goes beyond the academicians to reveal both the internal and external forces acting on all of us. This humane, widescreen view of adulthood speaks eloquently to men and women, to couples and singles, to "wunderkinds" and late bloomers, to careerists and homemakers. It is the only book that brings together a coherent vision of the passages we must all take through the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties toward what is potentially the best of life.
New Passages (I read New Passages two or three years ago)
Millions of readers literally defined their lives through Gail Sheehy’s landmark best seller, Passages, named by a Library of Congress survey as one of the most influential books of our time. In 1995 ago she set out to write a sequel, but instead she discovered a historic revolution in the adult life cycle
People are taking longer to grow up and much longer to die – thereby shifting forward all the stages of adulthood by up to 10 years. She traces radical changes for the generations now in the Tryout Twenties and Turbulent Thirities and finds baby boomers in the Flourishing Forties rejecting the whole notion of middle age. In its place Gail Sheehy discovers and maps out a completely new frontier – Second Adulthood in middle life.
"Stop and recalculate," she writes. "Imagine the day you turn 45 as the infancy of another life." Instead of declining, men and women who embrace a Second Adulthood are progressing through entirely new passages into lives of deeper meaning, renewed playfulness, and creativity beyond menopause and male menopause. But we are all a little lost. The old demarcations and descriptions of adulthood, beginning at 21 and ending at 65, are hopelessly out of date. Sheehy presents startling facts: A woman who reaches age 50 today – and remains free of cancer and heart disease – can expect to see her ninety-second birthday. Similarly, men can expect a dramatically lengthened life span. To plot our route across these vast new stretches of Second Adulthood, we need a new map of adult life.
Sheehy vividly dramatizes these newly developing stages through hundreds of personal and group interviews. Her original insights are borne out by extensive research. New Passages draws on national surveys of professionals and working-class people and fresh findings comparing five generations extracted from fifty years of U.S. Census reports. Combining the scholar’s ability to synthesize data with the novelist’s gift for storytelling, Gail Sheehy allows us to make sense of our own lives by understanding others like us.
New Passages tells us we have the ability to customize our own life cycle. This groundbreaking work awakened and permanently altered the way we think about ourselves, as did the original Passages.
(I heard Gail Sheehy speak a couple years ago at IPFW and she is just delightful)
The years between 18 and 50 are the center of life, a time of growth and opportunity. But until now no guide has existed to help us understand the mysterious process by which we become adults.
Studies of child development have plotted every nuance of growth and given us comforting labels such as the "Terrible Twos" and the "Noisy Nines." Yet what Gesell and Spock did for children hasn’t been done for us adults. Whenever psychologists do address themselves to adult life, it is in terms of its "problems" – rarely from the perspective of continuing changes through the life cycle. But now a new concept of adult development has begun to emerge.
Gail Sheehy, an author those investigative reporting has won numerous prizes, set herself three objectives in writing this pioneering book: to locate the personality changes common to each stage of life; to compare the developmental rhythms of men and women – which she found strikingly unsynchronized; and, in light of this, to examine the crises that couples can anticipate. Which passages cause one partner to put an extra strain on the other? How do their needs and drams change with age?
Drawing on three years of painstaking research and 115 in-depth interviews, Gail Sheehy goes beyond the academicians to reveal both the internal and external forces acting on all of us. This humane, widescreen view of adulthood speaks eloquently to men and women, to couples and singles, to "wunderkinds" and late bloomers, to careerists and homemakers. It is the only book that brings together a coherent vision of the passages we must all take through the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties toward what is potentially the best of life.
New Passages (I read New Passages two or three years ago)
Millions of readers literally defined their lives through Gail Sheehy’s landmark best seller, Passages, named by a Library of Congress survey as one of the most influential books of our time. In 1995 ago she set out to write a sequel, but instead she discovered a historic revolution in the adult life cycle
People are taking longer to grow up and much longer to die – thereby shifting forward all the stages of adulthood by up to 10 years. She traces radical changes for the generations now in the Tryout Twenties and Turbulent Thirities and finds baby boomers in the Flourishing Forties rejecting the whole notion of middle age. In its place Gail Sheehy discovers and maps out a completely new frontier – Second Adulthood in middle life.
"Stop and recalculate," she writes. "Imagine the day you turn 45 as the infancy of another life." Instead of declining, men and women who embrace a Second Adulthood are progressing through entirely new passages into lives of deeper meaning, renewed playfulness, and creativity beyond menopause and male menopause. But we are all a little lost. The old demarcations and descriptions of adulthood, beginning at 21 and ending at 65, are hopelessly out of date. Sheehy presents startling facts: A woman who reaches age 50 today – and remains free of cancer and heart disease – can expect to see her ninety-second birthday. Similarly, men can expect a dramatically lengthened life span. To plot our route across these vast new stretches of Second Adulthood, we need a new map of adult life.
Sheehy vividly dramatizes these newly developing stages through hundreds of personal and group interviews. Her original insights are borne out by extensive research. New Passages draws on national surveys of professionals and working-class people and fresh findings comparing five generations extracted from fifty years of U.S. Census reports. Combining the scholar’s ability to synthesize data with the novelist’s gift for storytelling, Gail Sheehy allows us to make sense of our own lives by understanding others like us.
New Passages tells us we have the ability to customize our own life cycle. This groundbreaking work awakened and permanently altered the way we think about ourselves, as did the original Passages.
(I heard Gail Sheehy speak a couple years ago at IPFW and she is just delightful)
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