The author was born in 1921 and has witnessed at first hand medical developments in geriatric medicine over more than seven decades, many of which he initiated or helped to drive forward. After a childhood spent in the Northeast of England and wartime service as a doctor with the Royal Air Force (RAF), he practised as a pioneering geriatrician on Teesside and in Yorkshire before moving to Australia in 1976 to take up the foundation chair of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Melbourne and the directorship of the newly inaugurated National Research Institute for Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine (NRIGGM), which was to morph into the National Ageing Research Institute (NARI) in 1994. The final five years of his Professorial career were spent in Galveston, Texas from 1986–1991 and he also consulted extensively for the World Health Organization. Now he finds himself caring for his wife who had a stroke over a year ago, so he really knows geriatric medicine inside out and has a truly global perspective on it.

With encouragement from family, friends and colleagues Derek Prinsley has produced a fascinating autobiography, with many thoughtful insights about the practice of geriatric medicine and some truly splendid anecdotes. As a young man he met both Wilfred Thesiger, author of The Empty Quarter, and John Christie, founder of the Glyndebourne Opera Festival, and he is one of a very small band of surviving RAF veterans actually to have flown in the cockpit of a Vickers Wellington.

Having worked as Derek Prinsley's junior resident medical officer in 1980 I am now the fifth director of NARI since its inception and every day have cause to be grateful for his leadership at an early and critical stage in the Institute's development. Of all the important developments in clinical care, teaching and research which he oversaw in his career, the one that Australians have most cause to be grateful for, is the 1984 inception of Geriatric (later Aged Care) Assessment teams, which determine whether older people with chronic disabilities need to receive government subsidised residential care, and which have led not only to the rehabilitation and maintainence in their own homes of thousands of older Australians, but also have enabled large sums of government money to be diverted from residential care to the funding of support services to allow them to stay at home, which is where most of them want to be. All this was driven by research conducted by Anna Howe at NRIGGM, with Derek Prinsley's strong support and encouragement.

Nobody who starts out to read this book will find it easy to put down. The erudition and charm of its author shine through on every page and there is something here for everyone, whether it be accounts of medical practice in the 1940s, the social milieu of South Texas in the 1980s or a consumer's perspective on geriatric medical and home support services in the second decade of the 21^st century. I recommend it to all members of the International Psychogeriatric Association. Just don't leave your copy lying about or you may find that someone else has picked it up and started to read it in your absence.

The book does not seem to be available through Amazon at present, but if you direct your web browser to http://www.scholarly.info/book/366/ you can buy a copy direct from the publisher.