Mature Content

Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. Take Seventy, where our guide to the “beginning of the end” stares out with bloodshot eyes, fingers massaging his temples and forehead. Hair greying at the corners, and mouth turned down. That’s Ian Brown — as in “frown.”

Brown cuts to the chase quickly. “I’m seventy (!) today. I wish I could say turning seventy feels better than it does, but seventy is the first age I have felt old,” he writes of his “terrifying and existential” milestone. “At seventy, as I founder and forget in what seems like a whole new, more significant way, I can actually see the hourglass running out.” Then he offers a cold, hard fact: the average lifespan of the American male is 78.4 years. “WTF!? That’s only eight and a bit years away. My passport expires later than that.” (For what it’s worth, the average is a bit higher for Canadian men.) Brown’s goal with Seventy is to describe getting older “to myself, if only so that I can...