Book Review: What's Worth Knowing by Wendy Lustbader

Overview of the Book and Its Author

Wendy Lustbader is the author of What's Worth Knowing. As a geriatric social worker, she met the experts on love, loss, suffering, and resilience — the older clients she encountered over a span of more than two decades. For her book, real people offer hard-won wisdom: the most significant insight each has gleaned through seventy, eighty, and ninety-plus years of living. Their first-hand experiences of facing hardship, finding love, taking risks, and living without regret form the core of the collection. Lustbader gathers the many lessons she learned from her plain-speaking older mentors. She is a teacher at a School of Social Work and a mental health counselor in Seattle.

Those people we encounter in this book are not popular names or celebrities, but ordinary individuals — grandparents, neighbors, teachers. In What's Worth Knowing, these seventy-, eighty-, and ninety-year-olds reveal the most important understanding each has acquired through a lifetime of living. While rearing children, making mistakes, surviving adversity, and ultimately discovering what really matters, they have collected the secrets of triumphing over life's challenges and achieving its joys.

Structure and Format of the Collection

The book captures the pulse and flavor of the individual contributors; every one of the single-page accounts reverberates with a spirit of great generosity and sincerity. A short, stirring biographical note — and sometimes a photograph — accompanies each story. The result is an intimate format that allows each voice to stand on its own terms, inviting readers to sit with one person's perspective before moving on to the next.

As Lustbader writes in her introduction, she came to this work almost by chance: "The assignment to listen to the stories of older people had opened up a world of unexpected richness to me. I decided to concentrate on gerontology for the rest of my time in social work school, which meant attending seminars with only three or four fellow students."

Central Questions the Book Explores

In her book, Lustbader asks: What factors make life meaningful? How do we live it well? What do we know now that we wish we had known when we were younger? What advice would we give a young person just starting out in life? Has anyone in our life taught us a valuable lesson — and what was it? If we could live our lives over again, what would we do differently, and what would we keep the same?

Despite the fact that these enduring questions have been explored through literature, art, and philosophy, the answers can actually be found much closer to home — in the hard-won insights of ordinary people. Lustbader recalls her first case as a student as a turning point: "We were both enchanted; she with the rush of memories and I with the sense of moving back in time to a way of life that had vanished. We stopped only because it was time for lunch. She grabbed my hand when I stood up to leave and said, 'No one has listened to me like that in years.'"

Voices from the Collection

At ninety-eight, Agnes McDougal can still taste the sweetness of an apple given to her by a stranger on a train when she was seventeen. Her lesson: "Kindness is never wasted." Having lived more than eighty years in the same small Massachusetts town, Bo Jackson reckons that "someplace else may always seem better, but where nobody knows you, you're nothing." Harold Jones, who in his seventy-six long years has never suffered a lonely instant, offers this: "A good listener is someone who's not talking."

Whether contributors are revealing the relationship between honesty and graceful aging, or conveying parenting wisdom gained through raising prize-winning tomatoes, the energetic expressions in What's Worth Knowing communicate life's collective contentment and regrets with unforgettable poignancy. There are individuals who lament their choice of partners or careers, those to whom small things brought great joy, and those who no longer speak to their children. No matter the situation or philosophy, each person's particular outlook — consistent or otherwise — shines through in their reflections on work, faith, love, and loss.