Fierce with Age: Chasing God and Squirrels in Brooklyn

In this "journey to the wild side of midlife," prolific author Orsborn (Vibrant Nation: What Women 50+ Know, Think, Do, and Buy) takes aging personally. Drawing from one-year diary she kept in her early sixties, Orsborn reveals the slow dawning that she, like her baby boomer brethren, "had become old." While Orsborn writes of becoming "fierce" with age, her musings lean more toward acquiescence than aggression. With gentle, self-effacing humor, for instance, she tells of losing her online writing berth, giving her time for walks in the park with her Maltese terrier mix, Lucky. She toys with turning Lucky's squirrel-chasing antics into a book of life lessons, only to discover to her chagrin that Deepak Chopra beat her to it. Short chapters%E2%80%94some less than a page long%E2%80%94maintain the spontaneous feeling of a diary, although every passage includes apt anecdotes and rich descriptions that keep this from being pure navel-gazing. Orsborn's year peaks with her development of guiding principles she calls the "11 Spiritual Truths of Aging." While it's a pivotal moment for the author, readers may recognize themselves more in the everyday vignettes that show how Orsborn came to accept the "unexpected onset of growing older." (May)