From Publishers Weekly
How are women of the baby-boomer generation handling the "M word," the change whose name they dare not speak? According to Sheehy's short report (expanded from her 1991 Vanity Fair article), many are utterly unprepared. The author ( Pathfinder ), who has been negotiating this passage herself, talks to doctors, nutritionists and a cross-section of women, examining both her own vacillation over estrogen replacement therapy and the more general questions of its side effects. We also hear from women who, having started families late in life, are catapulted from first babies to first hot flashes , and from such celebrities as Candice Bergen and Lesley Ann Warren. There are many frenetic and some encouraging menopause war stories here, but few accounts from women who experienced little difficulty during these years. Sheehy includes discussion of herbal remedies, exercise and dietary defenses against osteoporosis. While remaining somewhat inconclusive, her review of this stage of life for women in anti-aging America is detailed and sympathetic.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Library Journal
When Sheehy, author of the classic Passages ( LJ 5/15/76) and The Man Who Changed the World: The Lives of Mikhail S. Gorbachev ( LJ 12/90), wrote about her personal experience with menopause in the October 1991 issue of Vanity Fair , the response from readers was overwhelming and compelled her to expand the article into this surprisingly slim book. Interviewing over 100 women in various stages of menopause and 75 experts, she examines the medical, psychological, and social aspects of this "silent passage." A biological change that spans five to seven years, this "second adulthood," according to Sheehy, has three stages: perimenopause, menopause, and coalescence. While Sheehy performs a valuable service in bringing this topic out into the open, her book is weakened by her cliched Cosmopolitan -style prose and New Age psychobabble. Still, with the older members of the Baby Boom generation entering menopause, there will be demand for this book. Readers seeking practical advice should consult Winnifred Cutler and Celso-Ramon Garcia's Menopause ( LJ 11/1/91). Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/91.
- Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.