An immediate, absorbing, intimate account.
The wayward yet inexorable progress of Alzheimer’s and the education of a caregiver and wife.
Garzione explains, regarding her husband Pat, “I needed him. I always have.” But when he developed Alzheimer’s, she had to be the steady and prepared one. Still, as the author writes, “You cannot approach this disease with a game plan…It makes its own rules.” So she learned to live a day at a time, marshalling her resources and coming to understand that one can’t control Alzheimer’s, but one can choose how to react to the disease. Amid all the pain, despair and exhaustion, she prizes the moments of humor and joy, assigning them as much power as the hard times, finding some measure of balance and an appreciation that “life is still going on.” Garzione’s pagelong entries are like flashes of Morse code–an instant or slice of her daily life in the world of Alzheimer’s. Readers observe the living theater of the disease–her husband serving her a frozen bagel, sharing music, a blessed midnight run to the market, Pat’s last attempt to write and the author’s realization that “[l]ove is going to cost…cost in time and in moments of pain and frustration.” These moments accrue, providing not so much wisdom–Garzione is too humble to make that claim, even if it may be laid–but appreciation of circumstance. She charts Pat’s dwindling, his grasping for words and getting lost, while delineating her role as caregiver–the “slow, gentle dance” as Pat follows her emotional lead. The constant erosion of his mental and physical condition is draining. Still, when he tells the author “You’re my girl,” it’s easy for readers to crack a smile.
An immediate, absorbing, intimate account.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-595-51338-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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