An upbeat memoir to savor and admire, Still Alive! proves that in your later years you can still be going strong . . . and having fun! “Old age is a shipwreck," Charles de Gaulle once observed. Not so, says Herb Gold in this lively, often hilarious memoir of his first seven decades. He is clearly enjoying every moment to its fullest. This is a book about how time overtakes us, how reminiscence, loss, hope, pain, success, failure—the lifelong accumulation of dreams and reality—crowd about us with every passing day. Combining a fascinating selection of people, places, and key events from a long life into the alembic of his ever-fertile imagination, Gold has distilled gold from his uncanny ability to recall conversations, anecdotes, atmosphere, and telling detail. By turns wickedly funny (“Prostate surgeries and hysterectomies are not immediately visible at art gallery openings.") and touching (“It's harder to learn how to laugh alone."),...

Tracker of lost memories and lost souls, the veteran San Francisco private eye Dan Kasdan manages, along his way from the 1960s to the 1990s, to find Priscilla, the love of his life, only to lose her. Kasdan, urged on by Priscilla, also finds himself entangled with Karim, the sleek pornographer and drug dealer who insists that only Dan is the right person to handle his transfers of cash and drugs. All three, Kasdan, Priscilla, and Karim, want more than what ordinary life can afford them. She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me is the story of the risks of love and age, played out against the turbulence of America's great metropolitan village, where freedom is no more easily come by than anywhere else.