bookish_sue 's review for:

Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom by Mary Catherine Bateson
2.5
Some musings on Mary Catherine Bateson’s “Composing a Further Life”: 

I picked up this book because it was referenced in another book I recently read (“Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Change,” Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky --  I still can’t tell you really what adaptive leadership is or why the average American knowledge worker like me needs to be so prepared for dangers. This book was recommended by Rev Nick, whose intelligence and insight I respect. So I’m predisposed to think I’m missing something.)

Back to this book. Bateson is the daughter of Margaret Mead. I read into how she must have been raised, and the fact that she was a white Western woman of the twentieth century, and how she frames this book, that Bateson lived an intellectual life and put much of her life energy into connecting with and exchanging ideas with people. That puts her in a position -- both the know-how experience and the connections -- to have “in-depth conversations” with a dozen or so people in their “Adulthood II” phases of life. 

It feels like Bateson traveled the US with a tape recorder and sat with her “subjects” for a very long coffee chat. These people Bateson features are often friends/colleagues; occasional friends-of-friends -- who are gay or working class -- in the name of diversifying the perspectives. These conversations are as much a look in the rearview mirror as they are an exploration about how each person is living their current life as an elder. 

I found it difficult to relate to the stories and the people in this book. These folks feel like they are of a different era. The book was written in the early 2000s, so these people experienced formative life events in the 1960s or even the 1950s -- a different era with different concerns. 

A few lines choice lines:
  • “”Diversity is the essence of creation.” (Jim, former dean of the Episcopal Cathedral of St John the Divine.
  • “I’m trying to figure out where my wisdom came from” (Dan, a gay man who didn’t have a career)
  • “I felt myself becoming…moving back into myself. I was conscious of it, and I knew that what I heard myself saying again was, This is God. This is what we are meant to be, and it’s what Jesus preached, it’s what he taught. Wholeness. Not perfection. Wholeness.” (Jane Fonda)

Bateson’s discussions with Jane Fonda take up a lot of space in this book. Which sounds suspiciously like trying to bank on celebrity. Yet Fonda’s life work and spiritual exploration carries this book. Perhaps because she is an actor, and as such is exploring being through her art, Fonda had the most awareness and the highest literacy for the work of adulting.

My main beefs: This book just isn’t that interesting. There’s too much Bateson, and the limits of her world view are on full display.