cover image Getting Better All the Time

Getting Better All the Time

Liz Carpenter. Simon & Schuster, $17.45 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-671-61157-6

Intended primarily, if not exclusively, for female readers, this highly personal reminiscence looks at the author's life before her success in Washington as Lady Bird Johnson's press aid and following her widowhood and subsequent return to Texas. There are chapters on Carpenter's ancestors, important to the history of the Lone Star State, but more about the challenge of living alone and the concerns of aging. She writes about the problems of finding a man interested in a woman in her 60s, of avoiding loneliness in the interim, of leading an active social life, of preparing food and, above all, of fighting for women's rights. Regrettably, the book is pervaded by a cloying lump-in-the-throat sentimentality. (July 14)