In Praise of Older Women

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Hale, J., Norman, A.D.,Bogle?J.,&Shaul?S.,The Task Force on Concerns of Physically Disabled Women. Within Reach, Planned Parenthood of Snohomish County, Inc., 1977, 4. Biographies of influential women such as PM Margaret Thatcher, chef Julia Child, Mother Teresa, feminist Gloria Steinem, actress Rita Moreno, inventor Ruth Handler, Judge Judy Sheindlin, and many more As a Hungarian writing in English, Vizinczey writes with a lucidity and economy of prose that puts most native English writers to shame. For one so wise you won’t find a shred of ego in this modest little book. Only fun poked at himself, and by extension at all men and women, for the fools that love makes of us all. Vizinczey also manages to write about sex with more class than most writers acquire in a lifetime. Described as one of ‘those foreigners who handle English in a way to make a native Anglophile pale with jealousy’, Anthony Burgess once said of him, ‘he can teach the English how to write English’. Vizinczey wrote two books of literary, philosophical and political essays: The Rules of Chaos (1969) and Truth and Lies in Literature (1985). Vizinczey cited his literary heroes as Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Stendhal and Kleist. [4] His best-known works were the novels In Praise of Older Women (1965) and An Innocent Millionaire (1983).

Vizinczey was born in Káloz, Hungary. [3] His first published works were poems which appeared in George Lukacs's Budapest magazine Forum in 1949, when the writer was 16. He studied under Lukacs at the University of Budapest and graduated from the city's Academy of Theatre and Film Arts in 1956. He wrote at that time two plays, The Last Word and Mama, which were banned by the Hungarian Communist regime. He took part in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and after a short stay in Italy, ended up in Canada speaking only 50 words of English, and eventually taking Canadian citizenship. He learned English writing scripts for Canada's National Film Board and the CBC. He edited Canada's short-lived literary magazine, Exchange. In 1966 he moved to London. In 2023, Telefilm Canada announced that the film was one of 23 titles that will be digitally restored under its new Canadian Cinema Reignited program to preserve classic Canadian films. [4] Reception [ edit ] Among many, Raylee George’s story makes stirring reading, admirable in her resilience in the face of outright cruelty and injustice; Lester Smith’s warm-hearted tough-mindedness is inspirational; Sharron Pfueller pushed through countless personal and career barriers to try to help save the planet. The widow and her clever son were as close as siblings. After an adventurous escape to the American army in Salzburg – adventures providing much picaresque material for In Praise – he joined his mother in Budapest in 1946.

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Stephen Vizinczey in 2015. His third novel, If Only, which absorbed him for at least 20 years, was published in 2016. Photograph: Antonio Olmos The delicious adventures of a young Casanova who appreciates maturity while acquiring it himself. In turn naive, sophisticated, arrogant, disarming, the narrator woos his women and his tale wins the reader (Polly Devlin Vogue) The amazing women profiled in Great Second Acts refused to be defined by the dates on their birth certificates. Their lives are testimony that one can be feisty after fifty—and this book says in no uncertain terms to those who think otherwise, in the words of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: “I dissent.”

There is a necessary stubbornness in the 20 women here; Kirkman reminds us of the Silent Generation’s horrible attitudes towards women with inconvenient pregnancies. She points out that the Whitlam government’s historic granting of single mothers’ financial support was life-changing, heralding a seismic shift in attitudes to women’s rights, rights that still need to be protected in a world where Saudi judges face being executed for being too lenient towards feminists. These are lives of courage and endurance: Val Leiper, brought up in Geelong in a housing commission house, survived the Ash Wednesday bushfires of 1983 and became a Director of Nursing while raising a family with her beloved husband, who died suddenly in his sleep beside her when she was 49. She went on to walk the Camino with undiagnosed lung cancer. Kaplan, H. S.,&Sager, C. J. Sexual patterns at different ages. Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality, &1971, 5 (6), 10–19. He is survived by his daughter, Marianne, from a relationship with the novelist Angela Lambert, by his stepdaughter, Mary, and two granddaughters, Monica and Joseline. However, it soon becomes apparent that András is precisely that which he rallies against at the outset of the memoirs. He proves himself to be a rather despicable protagonist with highly questionable attitudes towards women. Despite his many claims to the contrary, his main problem with younger women seems not to be their dress or immaturity, but that he cannot entice them to sleep with him quite so easily as married or lonely women of more advanced years. His final documented conquest is told that ‘I got the worst of you … Here you are, a wise and beautiful woman, and I have to content myself with memories of a silly bitch at Lake Couchiching. It isn’t fair.’ Clearly András doesn’t seem to have learned much from his encounters, from the endless love and adoration that women have bestowed upon him. This gives the novel its bitter edge; András cannot see that his love of women is narcissistic, that he loves them for their ability to boost his esteem and for the size of their breasts, but still believes that he is above the teenage immaturity that defines him. This is not a man who loves women, but a man who loves himself.

The Sydney Morning Herald

Sontag, S. The double standard of aging. Saturday Review of Literature, September 23, 1972, 1, p. 55. Seventy-four looked old then but with one exception, isn’t old enough to be one of the 20 interviewees in Maggie Kirkman’s book Time of Our Lives: Celebrating Older Women. The cut-off point is 1946. This generation is the last who grew up without television and although the book does not point this out explicitly, it becomes more relevant as we read about their various childhood experiences. Only a few years later, Baby Boomers were being brought up by television as much as school, church and family. Each chapter of this short novel is a mini parable about the war of love and sex that men and women wage. Lessons are hard learned, often repeated. Reading it felt like leafing through one’s teenage diaries in old age, wincing at every naïve, stupid thing you’d ever done or said.

The film basically covers all of Berenger's sexual adventures with women who are somewhat older than he is. While he seems to fall deeply in love with them, these relationships don't seem to work out for him. He spent his last years revisiting the Company, watching French films of the 50s, keeping watch over the slowly failing Gloria and blogging with new, young readers about the masterpieces he never tired of: King Lear, The Idiot, Candide. Above all, he never ceased to grieve over what he saw as the infantilisation and hypersensitivity of the modern world.As love is an emotional glimpse of eternity, one can’t help half-believing that genuine love will last forever. When it would not, as in my case it never did, I couldn’t escape a sense of guilt about my inability to feel true and lasting emotions… In this I’m like most of my sceptical contemporaries… We think of ourselves as failures, rather than renounce our belief in the possibility of perfection. We hang on to the hope of eternal love by denying even its temporary validity. It’s less painful to think ‘I’m shallow’, ‘She’s self-centred’, ‘We couldn’t communicate’, ‘It was all just physical’, than to accept the simple fact that love is a passing sensation, for reasons beyond our control and even beyond our personalities. But who can reassure himself with his own rationalizations? No argument can fill the void of a dead feeling – that reminder of the ultimate void, our final inconstancy. We’re untrue even to life.” A funny novel about sex, or rather (which is rarer) a novel which is funny as well as touching about sex ... elegant, exact and melodious (Isabel Quigly Sunday Telegraph)