Dudley Clendinen

Critic's Choice: Unless you've recently been living deep in the Amazon rain forest, you've probably heard that baby boomers are getting pretty old, some of them reaching retirement age. The corollary is that their parents are getting really old, many of them filling up senior housing across the country. Places like Tampa's Canterbury Tower, where former New York Times writer Dudley Clendinen's mother lived her final days, and where he spent more than a year in the mid-1990s, observing and interacting with the bayside geriatric apartment house's residents and staff. Today he discusses and signs the book he got out of the experience, A Place Called Canterbury: Tales of the New Old Age in America, at the Pratt's Central Library. If you're in City Paper's core demographic--fairly young, but no longer a whippersnapper--A Place may be a better representation of what your approaching old age will actually be like than something like, say, Young@Heart. So get reading already. (Christopher Skokna)