GAIL SHEEHY

Cada vez aumenta más la esperanza de vida. Llegar a los ochenta años ya no es una excepción. ¿Se acaba la vida a los cincuenta? ¿O a los sesenta? ¿Cómo desarrollar una vida en plenitud hasta el final? ¿Como utilizar de forma positiva toda la experiencia acumulada a lo largo de los años? Estos son los interrogantes a los que responde esta obra. En la vida de todos los hombres llega un momento en que se tienen que enfrentar a unos cambios vitales. El problema reside en que nadie les ha preparado para ello. Este libro quiere ser una guia de viaje, un manual para el autodescubrimiento. No se trata unicamente de la perdida de potencia sexual, hoy casi corregida gracias a la medicina, sino tambien de aquellas crisis vitales y periodos de transicion que enfrentan hombres y mujeres a medida que avanzan por la vida. Aunque estos periodos son dificiles para todo el mundo, no tienen por que provocar una depresion ni una perdida de autoestima o de salud. Este libro ofrece a sus lectores una vision positiva de la vida, basada en la investigacion sobre cientos de casos reales. Nos cuenta como los hombres, en su madurez, tienen la oportunidad de ser los dueños de su destino, de ser mejores amantes, mejores padres, mas autenticos respecto a sus sentimientos y mas libres aun, si cabe, que en su juventud.

Her stunning bestsellers Passages and New Passages brilliantly mapped the changes we live through from youth to maturity. Now Gail Sheehy guides contemporary men through the turbulent challenges and surprising pleasures that begin at forty. As a man crosses that threshold, he is bound to ask midlife's most troubling question: Now what? Work anxieties, concerns over sexual potency, marital and family stress, issues of power, all take on new urgency as men contemplate the decades ahead. But as Gail Sheehy reveals in this major new book, midlife is precisely the period when men are most likely to reinvent themselves and become masters of their fate. In Understanding Men's Passages, Sheehy offers all men--and the women in their lives--an essential guide to self-discovery.

THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Millions of readers literally defined their lives through Gail Sheehys landmark bestseller Passages. Seven years 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. A fifty-year-old woman--who remains free of cancer and heart disease-- can expect to see her ninety-second birthday. Men, too, can expect a dramatically lengthened life span. The old demarcations and descriptions of adulthood--beginning at twenty-one and ending at sixty-five--are hopelessly out of date. In New Passages, Gail Sheehy discovers and maps out a completely new frontier--a Second Adulthood in middle life."Stop and recalculate," Sheehy writes. "Imagine the day you turn forty-five 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 both male and female menopause. Through hundreds of personal and group interviews, national surveys of professionals and working-class people, and fresh findings extracted from fifty years of U.S. Census reports, Sheehy vividly dramatizes these newly developing stages. Combining the scholars ability to synthesize data with the novelists gift for storytelling, she 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 is certain to awaken and permanently alter the way we think about ourselves."SHEEHY CLEARLY STATES IDEAS ABOUT LIFE THAT HAVE NEVER BEFORE BEEN AS CLEARLY STATED."--Los Angeles Times Book Review"AN OPTIMISTIC ANALYSIS OF ADULT DEVELOPMENT IN PESSIMISTIC TIMES. . . It is grounded in the economic and psychological realities that make adult life so complex today."--The New York Times Book Review

A seasoned woman is spicy. She has been marinated in life experience. . . . She can be alternately sweet, tart, bubbly, mellow. She can be maternal and playful. Bossy and submissive. Strong and soft. . . . The seasoned woman knows who she is. She could be any one of us, as long as she is committed to living fully and passionately in the second half of life.In her most groundbreaking work since Passages and The Silent Passage, bestselling author Gail Sheehy reveals a hidden cultural phenomenonincreased vitality in womens sex and love lives after fifty. Sex and the Seasoned Woman is the story of an intimate revolution taking place under our very noses. Boomer generation women in midlife are open to sex, love, dating, new dreams, exploring spirituality, and revitalizing their marriages as never before. This is a new universe of passionate, liberated womenmarried and singlewho are unwilling to settle for the stereotypical roles of middle age and are now realizing they dont have to. As life spans grow longer and as societal constraints continue to loosen, older womenonce free of the exhausting demands of young children, needy husbands, and demanding careersfind themselves ready to pursue the passionate life. They embrace their second adulthood as a period of reawakening.Written in Sheehys singularly compelling style, combining interviews and research, this book gives voice to more than a hundred fascinating and colorful women. The inspiring stories tell of wives who reinvigorate their marriages after their children leave the nest as well as divorced, widowed, and long-single women who find new dreams and new loves. Sheehy delineates a crucial link between cultivating a new dream and reopening the pathway to intimacy and sexual pleasure. She also examines the latest medical breakthroughs addressing symptoms that have unnecessarily curtailed womens sex lives.From women who find their sexuality reawakened by a younger lover, to couples whose marriages survive health crises and grow stronger, to women who finally find a soulmate in their sixties, to stories from seasoned sirens in their seventies, eighties, and even nineties, these portraits cover an enormous range of experience. In them, Sheehy locates the universal patterns that enable us all to recognize and understand our own lives.

The single event that we know as 9/11 is over, but the shock waves continue to radiate outward, generated by orange alerts, terrorism lockdowns, and the shrinking of personal liberties we once took for granted. The stories in this book, of real people faced with extraordinary trauma and gradually transcending it, are the best antidote to our fears. Middletown, America is a book of hope.All Americans were hit with some degree of trauma on September 11, 2001, but no place was hit harder than Middletown, New Jersey. Gail Sheehy spent the better part of two years walking the journey from grief toward renewal with fty members of the community that lost more people in the World Trade Center than any other outside New York City. Her subjects are the women, men, and children who remained after the devastation and who are putting their lives back to-gether. Sheehy tells the story of four widowed moms from New Jersey who started out scarcely knowing the difference between the House and the Senate, yet turned their sorrow and anger into action and became formidable witnesses to the failures of the countrys leadership to connect the dots before September 11. Sheehy follows the four moms as they ght White House attempts to thwart the independent commission investigating 9/11 and expose efforts at a cover-up. What would become of the young wives carrying children their husbands would never see, wives who had watched their dreams literally go up in smoke in that amphitheater of death across the river? Amazingly, each nds her own door to the light. Here, too, is the story of the widow and widower who met in the waiting room of a mental-health agency and brought each other back from the brink of despair across a bridge of love. Sheehy also reveals how bereft mothers who will never have another son or daughter found reasons to recommit to life. And she follows in the footsteps of the robbed children, documenting the incredible resilience of four-year-olds, the anger of teenagers, the courage of sisters and brothers. Sheehy follows survivors who escaped the burning towers only to nd themselves trapped inside a tower of inner torment, from which it took love, family, and faith to free themselves. She is taken into the con-dence of the night crew at Ground Zero, police ofcers who worked in that pit for eight months straight and then faced the returning home phenomenon. She recounts the confessions of religious leaders who struggled to explain the inexplicable to their ocks. Mental-health professionals conde in her, as do corporate chiefs, educators, friends and neigh-bors, town ofcials, and volunteers who rose to the occasion and committed themselves to healing their wounded community. As a journalist who conducted more than nine hundred interviews, Gail Sheehy is an impeccable researcher. As a writer with a novelistic gift, she weaves the individual stories into a compelling narrative. Middletown, America illuminates every stage of a tumultuous passagefrom shock, passivity, and panic attacks, to rising anger and deep grieving, and on to the secret romances and startling relapses, the realignment of faith, the return of a capacity to love and be loved, and, nally, the commitment to constructing new lives.

Why does she stay with him? Where does she go from here? The author who revealed a generations Passages now answers all the questions about the most talked-about First Lady in American history. In Hillarys Choice, Hillary Clinton is rendered fully human for the first time. Here is the life of a woman that is also the story of a marriage--and the drama of a presidency.From her childhood with a demanding father and frustrated mother to her life as a professional wife determined to elect her husband president . . . from the sexual betrayals that nearly broke her to the national scandal that remade her . . . this is the epic journey of a modern American woman, a saga that begins in passivity, moves through self-punishment, and ends in power.Who was the one "other woman" who posed a serious threat to their marriage? What was the real reason for the health care failure? How did Hillary escape the snare of Kenneth Starr? How has she managed, through it all, to be a good mother? No matter what her future, the mysteries about Hillary Clintons past have been fully resolved by Hillarys Choice, a stunning achievement from a master chronicler of our times.