An unvarnished cautionary tale, demonstrating that anyone who assumes caregiving responsibilities blindly or out of guilt is...
In her debut, journalist Gillies strikingly chronicles her slow disintegration as she struggled to nurse a mother-in-law stricken with Alzheimer’s disease.
When the author agreed to care for her husband’s elderly parents—Morris dwindling physically, Nancy dwindling mentally—the family moved into a rambling Victorian manse in northern Scotland. The heavy weather of their remote peninsula paralleled the gathering storms inside Nancy’s head. Tangling the lines of communication in her brain, the disease ate steadily through her memory, emotions and thought processes. With economy of expression, an eye for detail and a storyteller’s knack for dialogue, Gillies charts Nancy’s terrible course from doddering to vicious and her own decline into caregiver dementia, complete with paranoia and depression. Along the way, the author makes numerous field trips into brain chemistry, following Alzheimer’s as it erases personality, robs the sufferer of memory, disinhibits behavior and finally truncates thought. Gillies explains with sparking anger how the United Kingdom’s social system has failed miserably to address dementia as an illness. Yet she can also tack away from the disease and let in some fresh air with a painterly description of their wild Scottish outpost. She once thought she might encounter the Sublime there, but “the hunt for the Sublime…has become a grimly private joke.” The constant grind of tending to Nancy was ruinous for Gillies, who progressed from sympathy over her mother-in-law’s tears, confusion, misery and baffled panic to simply wanting to be rid of a woman whose rants and rages had become everyday—indeed, every hour—occurrences. From this bleak family experience “soaked marrow-deep in defeat,” the author emerged with awe and gratitude for a working brain: “how associative it is and how rich, in its leading from one thing to another, into that whole interior landscape of yoked-together and often incongruous thoughts that adds up to a self.”
An unvarnished cautionary tale, demonstrating that anyone who assumes caregiving responsibilities blindly or out of guilt is hopping on a greased chute to self-destruction.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-71911-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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