Losing It: In Which an Aging Professor Laments His Shrinking Brain.

• Author: White, James J.
• Position: Book review

LOSING IT: IN WHICH AN AGING PROFESSOR LAMENTS HIS SHRINKING BRAIN. By William Ian Miller. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2011. Pp. viii, 328. $27.

INTRODUCTION

Bill Miller (1) has done something quite uncommon, possibly singular: he has become a prominent law professor by writing books that have nothing to do with the law. His books do not even have the remote relation to law that books by philosophers or historians can claim. Having studied medieval history before law school and achieved law school tenure by teetering on the edge of law in his work on Icelandic sagas, Miller jumped the fence completely in his books The Mystery of Courage, The Anatomy of Disgust, and Faking It. He has never returned. Presumably, this Review earned a place in an issue devoted to "law books" only because the student editors could not swallow the heresy that a member of a law faculty--who, believe it or not, teaches property--could be writing about something unrelated to law.

Where in the academic literature do Miller's books on courage, faking, and disgust, and his latest book, on old age, fit? Certainly, those who describe his latest book Losing It: In Which an Aging Professor Laments His Shrinking Brain as an autobiography are wrong. Of course Miller, in his most engaging, neurotic manner, uses his own real and imagined experiences as examples, but those examples do not make an autobiography. All of his books take behaviors that everyone has experienced directly (disgust and faking) or vicariously (courage), and disassemble them to show their qualities and demonstrate our ignorance--is a Japanese soldier who has been trained from youth to fight to the death exhibiting "courage" when he heads into battle? These books belong to psychology or maybe sociology. Bill Miller is a fine lawyer, but he is an even better psychologist.

Losing It could be titled "Denial and Acceptance." The main theme of the book is introduced by a quotation from The Tempest: "And as with age his body uglier grows, So his mind cankers." (2) Bill traces (and exaggerates) both our mental and our physical decline. And he firmly rejects the thought that there is any redeeming or offsetting virtue in growing old. Through references to biblical and ancient Icelandic characters, Miller rounds out his case not only for the decline that the aged suffer but also for their capture by unbecoming thoughts and behavior; in his view they are peevish, selfish, mean spirited, and generally unhappy. But as I will suggest, we should be skeptical of these claims and skeptical even that Miller really believes them to be true.

Unlike all of the other reviewers of this book, I am a good friend of Bill, and I recognize many of the book's examples from personal conversations with him. I have listened to his extensive, neurotic complaints about his knees, back, and memory. So I have more context than others, but I am also constrained from saying what a harsh critic might given my knowledge of Bill's extremely thin skin--a trait displayed last winter when an unfriendly reviewer dismissed the book as the whining of an aging baby boomer.

That critic was wrong. Bill is not whining; he is doing here what he did before in Courage and Disgust. He is showing the complexity of something commonly thought to be simple. By forcing us to abandon denial and to recognize the daily manifestations of our decline, he is doing something that he did not have to do in his other books: he is attacking our psychological defenses. Understand that Miller is not really complaining...