Word: curtins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sympathetically about their elders. David Kaufelt's first novel is appropriately titled Six Months with an Older Woman-and they are comically instructive months. One of the best of the recent books on older people, Nobody Ever Died of Old Age, was written by 34-year-old Sharon Curtin, a '60s radical...
...slashed with her cane at any child bold enough to bounce a ball on her block. Yet she showed a certain genius as she regularly feigned senility in department stores, knocking down piles of goods in her awkwardness-and slipping items slickly under her clothes in the confusion. Author Curtin also appreciates the defiant spirit of Letty the Bag Lady, who carried all her possessions everywhere in two sacks, terrified that they might otherwise be stolen. Letty knew that "this face of mine pulls and tugs in all different directions like an old sweater sagging." But she scoffed at those...
...Sharon Curtin's close friends is Miss Emily Larson, a skilled bridge player at 96, who became ill and was placed in a hospital for the old. There she "sundowned"-experienced hallucinations because of strange surroundings. Miss Larson had the sense-and means-to refuse to join other patients in "the parking lot," a drab room in which they were expected to sit mutely in wheelchairs or, as a special treat, were asked to sing childish songs. There was also Charlie, who had stuck his head in his gas oven, and who complained when rescued...
...Curtin attacks the whole concept of forced retirement. She tells of a retired furniture salesman, who had wanted all his life to be a carpenter. Finally he had the time, offered to work free as an apprentice to learn the trade, but was told the unions would object, or insurance could not be had to cover the risk at his age; he was even too old to join a trade school carpentry class. Instead, he was directed to a hobby shop where, rather than build furniture, he could learn to burn homilies into pieces of wood...
...Sharon Curtin holds out little hope that books such as hers will work great changes in the attitude of the young. She pleads instead with the elderly them selves to "turn their energies toward discovering their common oppression" and to revolt. Essentially, she seeks the same kind of consciousness raising that has propelled the Women's Liberation movements. Yet her clean, unsentimental prose makes a valiant effort to ex pose, and perhaps modify those murderous attitudes toward the aged which, she claims, kill just as surely as do accidents and disease...