Old Man Country: My Search for Meaning Among the Elders

Thomas R. Cole is the McGovern Chair and Director of the McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics at University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. Cole graduated from Yale University (B.A., 1971), Wesleyan University (M.A., 1975) and the University of Rochester (Ph.D., 1981). His work has been featured in The New York Times, NPR, Voice of America, PBS, and at the United Nations. He has served as a consultant to the President's Council onBioethics, as an advisor to and speaker for the United Nations NGO Committee on Ageing, the Union for Reform Judaism, and various editorial and foundation boards. Cole has published many articles and several books on the history of aging and humanistic gerontology. His book The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America (Cambridge, 1992) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Among other books, he edited The Oxford Book of Aging, which was noted by the New Yorker as one of the most memorable books of the year. Cole'sinterest in the life stories of older people has taken him into biography and film-making. His book No Color Is My Kind: the Life of Eldrewey Stearns and the Desegregation of Houston (1997) was adapted into the film, The Strange Demise of Jim Crow, which was broadcast nationally on over 60 PBS stations and internationally by the State Department. Cole's film Still Life: The Humanity of Anatomy, was an official selection at the Doubletake Documentary Film festival in2002. In 2007, he co-produced Stroke: Conversations and Explanations, a prize-winning film about the invisible world of stroke survivors.