Fifty: Midlife

A professor of psychiatry at Stanford, the author provides more information than advice on midlife matters. He has a calm, often colorless style, and readers will discover little new among the statistics and research findings he presents on the ways aging affects the body, sexuality, career development and personal relationships. Indeed, some of the material states the obvious. (""Those who make up the great majority of the world's population work in order to provide for the basic necessities of life.'') But the key points can't be repeated enough: that reaching 50 should be a time to evaluate one's life; midlife crises need not overwhelm those who look realistically at the future; and there can be ``vast new vistas of sexual satisfaction in midlife.'' (May)