A compassionate, cathartic, and searingly intimate chronicle of a crippling condition.
An errant son memorializes the devastating impact of his father’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease.
Acclaimed for his work with inner-city schoolchildren, National Book Award winner Kozol’s (Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America, 2012, etc.) memoir centers around the subsequent fallout of his father’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis at age 88 in 1994. A former Boston-area neurologist with an instructional practice at a Harvard teaching hospital, Dr. Harry Kozol began experiencing memory lapses, “interrupted consciousness,” and confused wandering spells, which he self-diagnosed as progressive brain cortex cell degeneration. The author dutifully retraces his familial ancestry and writes frankly of an all-consuming rebelliousness that estranged him from his father for a time during the 1960s. Later, Kozol’s prolific literary endeavors kept the family distanced further, a situation the author has come to palpably regret in hindsight. While his father’s increasing physical frailty and mental fragmentation eventually forced him into a nursing home, the event, however tragic, provided both men ample time to bond and make up for time lost. A poignant consideration of precious memories, the memoir is also accented by Kozol’s newfound respect for his father’s former sense of “dignity and intellectual engagement” throughout his life, as well as in his profession, an occupation often complicated by the great mental complexities of his patients. As his father’s recognition skills and physical agility faltered further, Kozol fully realized the exhaustive challenge of caretaking for a parent. As a reading experience, the entire ordeal only becomes wearying when Kozol’s mother also begins exhibiting symptoms akin to his father’s rapidly deteriorating lucidity. Readers familiar with the emotional toll exacted by a loved one with Alzheimer’s will embrace Kozol’s nostalgic, often heart-wrenching narrative as an important addition to the genre.
A compassionate, cathartic, and searingly intimate chronicle of a crippling condition.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8041-4097-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
