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“It is more important than ever for us to learn from
those who have come before us, to understand what they can teach us, and what we can teach our children about them.”
-- Jerry Friedman,
Director of The Earth's
Elders Foundation
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EARTH'S ELDERS:
The Wisdom of
the World’s Oldest People
Words and Photographs by Jerry Friedman
Edited by Mark Chimsky-Lustig
$35.00 / CDS distributors
275 Pages / 52 black-and-white photos / hardcover
Earth’s Elders: The Wisdom of the World’s
Oldest People is an unprecedented look at the hearts, minds, and spirits of
fifty of our planet’s “supercentenarians”—those who have lived to be 110 years old and older. This landmark project is the result of author Jerry Friedman’s three-year effort
to document, in photographs and words, the human stories that have, surprisingly, never been told before now.
Friedman, an award-winning photographer in the field of television and
print advertising, embarked on a personal journey of discovery that took him around the globe.
From the steppes of Mongolia to Manchester-by-the-Sea in Massachusetts, he encountered members of the “hidden
tribe” of supercentenarians—ordinary people who have reached extraordinary ages. In his remarkable portraits, Friedman celebrates their lives, illuminating the rarely glimpsed worlds of
men and women who have lived through three different centuries. Their rich and
colorful stories touch the heart, and provide us with intriguing clues into the mysteries of longevity.
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Jerry Friedman is the
first person to interview so many of the men and women who are on the outer edge of the human life span.
Published in November 2005,
EARTH'S ELDERS
has sold 9.500 copies to date
through bookstores around the country,
via CDS/Perseus distributors
(as of 3/3/2006)
Author
proceeds from the sale of this book will go to the Earth’s Elders Foundation Inc., a non-profit organization created
to foster positive and profound change in America’s consciousness of the elderly.
Earth’s Elders provides a window into the world of these women
and men, amazing people whose lives are "human time capsules," spanning more than a century. Their oral histories of
unique experiences – the torching of the all-black town of Rosewood in Florida, the atom bomb attack on Hiroshima, the fall of the last Chinese Dynasty, the assassination of President McKinley,
or the dawning of new inventions 9like the automobile or the washing machine0 bring everyday life in the 20th Century vividly
to life.
Loneliness,
poverty and despair are many of the everyday conditions of the elderly that go unnoticed by the general public.
The mission of The Earth’s Elders Foundation is to improve the quality of life of the elderly,
to teach children to recognize the wisdom and value of the elderly as positive and essential parts of our families and our
society, and to improve the health of our communities through intergenerational tolerance and communication.
Each of the book’s “extreme elders”—from the cotton
picker in rural Georgia to the member of the royal family in England—is an eyewitness to history and holds a piece of
the puzzle that yields special insights into health and the aging process.
FOR INFORMATION ABOUT THE EARTH'S ELDERS FOUNDATION, CLICK HERE
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four contributed essays and personal reflections in this book are from some
of today’s most distinguished thinkers:
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Dr. Robert Coles, professor of psychiatry at Harvard, researcher,
and Pulitzer Prize-winning author;
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Dr. M. Joycelyn Elders, former Surgeon General of the United
States and committed advocate for health care and education;
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Chief Arvol Looking Horse, spiritual leader of the Lakota, Dakota,
and Nakota Nation and 19th Generation Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe;
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Lama Surya Das, colleague of the Dalai Lama, bestselling author,
and the most highly trained American lama in the Tibetan tradition of Buddhism.
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