Roctogenarians

About This Book

Eighty has been the new sixty for about twenty years now. In fact, there have always been late-in-life achievers, those who declined to go into decline just because they were eligible for social security. Journalist, humorist, and history buff Mo Rocca and coauthor Jonathan Greenberg introduce us to the people past and present who peaked when they could have been puttering--breaking out as writers, selling out concert halls, attempting to set land-speed records--and in the case of one ninety-year-old tortoise, becoming a first-time father. In the vein of Mobituaries, Roctogenarians is a collection of entertaining and unexpected profiles of these unretired titans--some long gone (a cancer-stricken Henri Matisse, who began work on his celebrated cut-outs when he could no longer paint), some [until recently] still living (the original EGOT, Rita Moreno). The amazing cast of characters also includes Mary Church Terrell, who at eighty-six helped lead sit-ins at segregated Washington, DC, lunch counters in the 1950s, and John Goodenough, who was more than good enough to score a Nobel Prize at ninety-seven for inventing the lithium-ion battery. Then there's Peter Mark Roget, who began working on his thesaurus in his twenties but completed it at ninety years old.