How to Live
By Henry Alford
272 pages; Twelve

Wrinkles aside, age may have its benefits—or so Henry Alford suspected when he set out to interview a few good old men and women for his lightly serious search for wisdom, How to Live. The perennially testy Edward Albee, the sagely self-deprecating Ram Dass, and continent-trotting activist Granny D know a thing or two about survival, also about "wrongheadedness and the occasional act of lunacy." The author's mother, barnstorming out of a lousy marriage at 79, is a role model for the ages.