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KEEPER

Name: KEEPER
Author: Andrea Gillies
ISBN: 978-0-307-71911-9

ONE HOUSE, THREE GENERATIONS, AND A JOURNEY INTO ALZHEIMER’S

by Andrea Gillies ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 17, 2010

An unvarnished cautionary tale, demonstrating that anyone who assumes caregiving responsibilities blindly or out of guilt is...

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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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HEALTH & FITNESS | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)