Caregivers may find solace in Sykes’ poignant memories.
Sykes’ debut memoir tells of the seven years she spent caring for her ailing, elderly mother.
The author was catapulted into the role of caregiver when her vibrant mother suffered macular degeneration, which eventually led to blindness. Sykes’ role became even more difficult when her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Meanwhile, her mother had to cope with permanently leaving her sister in Florida—as well as the independence of her own condo—to live in much smaller institutional spaces near Sykes’ Massachusetts home. As the author became an advocate for her mother’s care, the two lost the carefree mother-daughter relationship they once had. Still, Sykes was determined to enjoy some aspects of their changing roles, and she ultimately learned to feel privileged to be her mother’s caregiver. There are some horror stories here; in one facility, for example, the author’s mother was physically and emotionally abused. However, Sykes also offers many uplifting moments; on her mother’s 90th birthday, for example, she was able to hold her first great-grandchild. Later, Sykes fulfills her mother’s dying request for a day at the beach, resulting in a beautiful mother-daughter memory. Readers shouldn’t expect a step-by-step elder-care guide or in-depth discussions of legal terms in this gentle narrative. However, there are some useful bits of information about nursing-home residents, such as their need for structured routine; for example, when Sykes hired companions to alleviate her mother’s loneliness, it turned out to be too stressful to have so many new people coming and going. Sykes also offers some worthwhile questions to ask when considering an elder-care facility, such as whether the institution has a physical therapy room and therapists on staff. The book also contains an exhaustive list of quotes and affirmations, including these words that Sykes spoke to her mother: “You have spent a lifetime giving to others. This is the time in your life to celebrate receiving from others.”
Caregivers may find solace in Sykes’ poignant memories.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1494224486
Page Count: 184
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2014
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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