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Reviews

A four-page selection appears in The Atlantic (October 2008).

From Hot Type in VANITY FAIR:

“This is your life! Obsessed with measur­ing your self-worth by age? Gird your loins for Eric Hanson’s A Book of Ages (Harmony/ Crown). To wit: Steve Jobs co­founded Apple at 21, and Edison dreamed up the light­bulb at 32. Take heart, though — Grandma Moses didn’t show her first painting until 78.”

From a review on BOOKSLUT.COM (December 2008):

“It’s guiltily heartening to learn how many creative geniuses — the ones whose rich mothers supported them, the ones who had to work at the post office, the ones who were boho couch surfers, the ones who were genuinely poor and hard-working — were so unfortunately bad at the ‘life’ part.”

From a review at MINNPOST.COM (December 12, 2008):

“Whew! There’s still plenty of time left to amass my fortune and see the world. Why, when he was my age, J.R.R. Tolkien had just imagined his first hobbit, Joseph Heller had just published Catch-22 and James Stewart had just starred in the box-office dud It’s a Wonderful Life.

From a review on MINNESOTA PUBLIC RADIO (November 29, 2008):

“A number of years ago Eric Hanson was working as an illustrator for Minnesota Monthly when he came up with a gag gift for a friend’s 30th birthday. It was three novels by famous writers who died before they were 30. He says it was meant as an ironic existential statement, but it launched him on a collecting binge which has become somewhat of an obsession.”

From a review in the San Jose MERCURY NEWS (October 24, 2008):

“You will immediately leaf to your age — in my case, 44 — to measure your life, to see if you were healthier than Ben Franklin (gout), F. Scott Fitzgerald (fatal heart attack) and Jackson Pollock (fatal car crash); happier than Prince Charles (splitting with Diana) and John Updike (divorcing; yet entitling his new novel Marry Me).”

From a full-page review in BOOKLIST:

“I’m happy to report that [this] compendium ... includes a healthy supply of underachieving tykes and grumpy or at least wildly eccentric seniors. And, perhaps best of all, there are lots of simple oddities (like what happened to Flannery O’Connor at age 5) and peculiar foreshadowings (Alfred Hitchcock at 6).”

From The Well-Rounded Man column in MEN’S HEALTH:

“Each chapter of Hanson’s smart anthology pulls together ‘who did what, at what age’ from infancy to age 100. A chapter like ‘Seventy-eight’ reminds you that there’s still time to write the novel, move to France, or master the C, F and G chords on the guitar.”

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Features

Check out Eric Hanson’s blog.

Become a fan of A Book of Ages on Facebook.