For the first time in history the average life-span for men and women in the west has doubled. It's prime time for this book which will revolutionise our ideas about age and ageing and revolutionise how we live our lives beyond 40. THE FOUNTAIN OF AGE is about and for men and women - of all ages. Betty Friedan weaves together her own own story, her experience of age, with a radical look at research studies and interviews to give us inspiring proof that ageing is a new stage, a time of growth, not the final stage in the slide from yo youth. The book opens: 'Last week I was 65; it was a birthday so dreaded thatI cannot belive I feel the way I really feel, here, now. Forced to take stock by this day, I feel a new pared down sureness, a strong easiness. I feel a strength from the spreading roots of my life and a liberation from its compulsions. I look in the mirror and I see myself the way I am, finally, simply, myself at 65'. The book ends with Betty Friedan at 72. It is liberating, poignant, optimistic, banishing the spectre of old age.