Robbins has moved on from his career as a successful ice-cream manufacturer to a zealous devotion to encouraging his fellow Americans to eat better. Here he examines selected data from four diverse cultures renowned for the numbers of centenarians among them. Robbins contends that the reason for these long lives lies in food and lifestyle issues. He sets store by organic foods, small portions, and lots of heart-stimulating exercise, the attributes he finds in common among all these old people despite their vast geographic remove from one another. Robbins' arguments would be strengthened if he presented more rigorous life-expectancy statistics about the general populations in which these elders flourish. Does every person in these societies live to 100? If not, what are the differences between the elders and the rest of their own societies? Advocates of globalization will cringe at Robbins' negative assessment of the inroads of world culture on formerly isolated societies. He stands on much firmer ground when he advocates greater respect for the elderly, their experience, and their wisdom in contemporary, youth-obsessed Western culture.