Worth Knowing by Wendy Lustbader Wendy Lustbader Term Paper

Worth Knowing by Wendy Lustbader

Wendy Lustbader is the author of What's Worth Knowing. As a geriatric social worker, she met the experts on love, loss, suffering and intelligence --the older clients she has encountered over a span of more then two decades. For her new book, real people offer hard-won wisdom: the most significant piece of information each has gleaned through seventy, eighty, and ninety-plus years of living. Their first hand experiences of facing hardship, finding love, taking risks, and living without regret; she gathers the many lessons she learned from her plain-speaking older mentors. Lustbader is a teacher at the University of Washington School of Social Work and a mental health counselor in Seattle.

The book captures the pulse and flavor of the individual contributors; every one of the single-paged accounts reverberates with a spirit of great generosity and sincerity. A short, stirring biographical note and sometimes a photo accompanies each story. In her book Lustbader asks, what factors make life superior? Moreover, how do we live it? What do we know now that we wish we had known when we were young (er)? What advice would we give a young (er) person just starting out in life? Has anyone in our life taught us a valuable lesson? What was that lesson? If we could live our life over again, what would we do differently? What would we keep the same?

Despite the fact that we have delved into these undying questions through literature, art, and philosophy, the answers can actually be found much closer to home -- in the hard-won insights of ordinary people. As she recalls, how it all began:

The assignment to listen to the stories of older people had opened up a world of unexpected richness to me. I decided to concentrate on gerontology for the rest of my time in social work school, which meant attending seminars with only three or four fellow students...."

Those people we come across in this book aren't popular names or celebrities, but ordinary individuals, grandparents, neighbors, teachers. In What's Worth Knowing, these seventy-, eighty-, and ninety-year-olds reveal the most important part of understanding each has acquired through a lifetime of living. While rearing children, making mistakes, surviving adversity, and ultimately discovering what really matters, they have collected the secrets of triumphing over life's…