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Summary: Shifts the paradigm on aging!!!
Review: Joan Anderson's latest memoir, A Walk on the Beach, is indeed a masterpiece! Through a chance encounter with a wise and inspiring older woman, Ms. Anderson becomes mentored on the valuable lessons of living a rich and purposeful life. As the story progress, it is evident that Ms. Anderson's experience is the experience of many and we, the readers, become the mentees. This book has wisdom for all ages, without a doubt. The reader is drawn into this relationship as it progresses into a powerful story of fully living our lives at each age and stage. I believe it is destined to become a classic from which generations will reflect on their lives with a new sense of possibility. It is an inspiration for anyone who allows themselves to become absorbed in this amazing place in time. Ms. Anderson has truly given the reader a wonderful gift, allowing us to spend precious time with Joan Erikson. I am grateful for this beautiful work, written with grace, humor and tremendous insight! After Anderson's best-selling A Year By the Sea (which I read several times!), I was thrilled to discover that she has brought us a work that will be read and savored for years to come.
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Summary: The divine trinity...
Review: While A Walk On The Beach represents the final part of a divine trinity of books, the internal divine trinity is the coming together of the two Joans in the presence of the Sea - which has always been a metaphor for Consciousness, the Womb of the Great Mother.Joan Anderson is a great observer of Life and the human experience, and her ablity to articulate the way people think and feel, especially in the context of relationships, of all kinds, is unsurpassed. That she should meet Erikson's wife in a beach/seashore setting, especially in Cape Cod, Mass, in magical New England, the virtual birthplace of what is now the United States, is most interesting - the seashore also being a symbolic point of transition for a mermaid/siren figure seeking transformation into mortal womanhood, as in The Girl In A Swing, by Richard Adams (also an excellent movie). With the two Joans, the transformation is mutual, as these wisewomen unfold their lives in quite different marital circumstances. For the record, Erikson the psychologist extended Freudian theory by factoring in the effects of culture and environment to the stages of human development rather than merely biological influences. To Erikson, development was a lifelong process. The main criticisms of this work focused on his gender and ethnocentric bias. The later, Third Wave psychology of Maslow and after, addressed the individual's relationship to the Universe itself, rather than the experiential layer generated by society. Joan Erikson herself continued to expand on the work she had done with her husband with her own hands-on experience of old age (she was 90 when the Joans met), and Joan A was able to benefit from this wisdom first hand. Similarly, she was able to help Joan Erikson with her own major life adjustments, including the impending death of a Life partner, by sharing her own growth lessons as she re-structured her thinking as she moved into the second stage of her life. I can see why some people regard this as 'a woman's book', (I disagree, it's a thinking PERSON'S book) but as a man with four daughters who has published a book about the suppression of the Feminine, I found it intriguing. The beautiful interactions between these two remarkable unfinished women reminds you that menopause and after is supposed to be a sacred transition, not a form of mental illness, as we have been programmed to believe. Invaluable.
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