cover image For My Next Act...: Women Scripting Life After Fifty

For My Next Act...: Women Scripting Life After Fifty

Karen Baar. Rodale Press, $22.95 (246pp) ISBN 978-1-57954-687-8

If 50 is the new 40, then women everywhere have much to celebrate as they begin this new chapter in their lives. However, as Baar explains in her introduction to this well researched self-help book, the changes in 50-somethings' lives force women""to reckon with themselves in both promising and disturbing ways.""""Because we didn't do what our mothers did,"" she writes,""we're creating our post-fifty roles as we go along."" A writer on health and nutrition, and the co-author of three books, Baar helps women make the most out of this self-creation. Baar's own soul-searching was prompted by the end of her 30-year marriage, which dissolved a week after she turned 50, but whether she's discussing coping with divorce or widowhood, caring for aging parents or living with adult children, she offers sound advice mixed in with extensive research and quotations from illuminating interviews with other women. The 50-something transition often includes grappling with health issues like cancer or high cholesterol, but for Baar, it's women's inward journeys to find meaning and connection with themselves and their friends and communities that literally and figuratively allows women to be more comfortable in their own skin.""Women in their fifties experience higher levels of happiness and satisfaction than women at all other stages of life,"" she reports. With its conversational""we're in this together"" attitude and its detailed bibliography, this book is a valuable resource for women readers, one that urges them to use their battle scars as reminders of where they've been and as proof of their toughness and ability to deal with whatever falls in their paths.