Stories from the retrospective study of the lives of a cohort of Harvard men who were there just before WWII broke out. Among the big lessons: we keep changing a lot over a lifetime; having a good childhood is protective but having a bad childhood does not guarantee a bad outcome; alcoholism is the cause of a lot of problems that are attributed to other things. ( )

Is it all about white men? Yes. Is it occasionally a bit preachy and pompous? Yes. And yet also: touching, empathetic, insightful. Brain plasticity FTW. ( )

I don't often get a book that felt so long but, regardless, this was a very good book. It was very interesting but I couldn't really place it in genre - it didn't try to help you improve your own life (directly) so it wasn't a self-help, it was more just a statement of discovery. In that sense it was truly great but hard to read at times because there seemed to be little one could do - even disregarding the birth situation, his major markers were still innate character traits.

I enjoyed it as a lens to view lives by and for insight into the social scientist's mindset (although he repeated his awe of longitudinal studies and why they are a useful too a few times too many, I started to feel like he was using this as a really extended grant proposal and not a book) ( )

This is a study of the men of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, commonly known as the Grant Study. This cohort has reached 90 and thus has experience from their whole lives available for the study. The cohort is not typical in any way as shown in that one third of them, selected in the late 1930s and early 1940s, have survived to 90. The book looks at what happens in maturity and particularly at very late ages. It begins with a description of some previous data and then a history of the Grant Study. Then it describes how earlier parts of life affect maturity and late age. The most interesting part of this section is childhood effects on adults and old age. And the most surprising thing is that pulse rate at rest of a mature adult is strongly affected by a warm childhood.

Then the book moves into what the author really wants to talk about, coping mechanisms (also called defense) and alcoholism. His study of coping mechanisms is subtle and not easily summarized except to say that mature coping mechanisms have all kinds of good effects for a happy life, especially if it turns out to be long. Vaillant's discussion of alcoholism is more easily summarized. Alcoholism is a disease, and an alcoholic who has become abstinent cannot successfully return to to social drinking, and Alcoholics Anonymous works. The chapter on alcoholism is the longest in the book and this is the longest longitudinal study of alcoholism ever made. This chapter alone is well worth reading. He closes with some unusual findings, such as that liberals continue to have sex about 10 years longer than conservatives. And he describes what he would do if he were starting this whole thing over.

This is a well-written book, it rarely drags even though it ventures into technical psychological areas. I wish it had used more percentages than counts; I felt like when some data were presented I kept having to go back and understand numerators and denominators. Well worth reading, especially for the mature male. ( )