THE DIN IN THE HEAD, by Cynthia Ozick
(Houghton Mifflin, $24; release date June 2, 2006)
Admit it — if you aren’t seventysomething yet, sometimes you wish you were, because then you could get away with speaking truth to power whenever the bloody hell you felt like it: either because no one would dare to punch a silver-haired dissenter in the mouth, because the elderly have acquired a lifetime of confidence [...]