A brief, moving hybrid work that pays tribute to one woman and her daughter.
Lynn’s debut memoir shares her struggle to care for her mother, whose mind slowly disintegrated from Alzheimer’s disease.
Lynn and her mother, Barbara Durling Miller, a retired executive secretary, hadn’t always seen eye to eye. Yet their relationship inevitably changed and in some ways deepened after Barbara was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Barbara was first cared for by her husband, but eventually she had to move to full-time residential care. The family disagreed at times about her care, and finding an appropriate facility proved a challenge. One treated her dementia with psychiatric medication; another typically treated less incapacitated patients. By the time Lynn’s mother was placed in a healthy environment, many of her memories and mental capacities had disappeared. Lynn writes movingly, and no doubt for fellow caregivers, comfortingly, about finding peaceful and loving moments with her mother even during advanced stages of the disease. The book includes Lynn’s poetry, which sometimes indulge in clichés—e.g. using butterflies to represent hope—but often contains striking, resonant lines as well. For example, Lynn observes that the necessary decluttering of the living space of an Alzheimer’s patient reflects the gradual fading of their pre-illness personalities: “Yet every time I visit / Your home has one less you.” She also writes insightfully about the particular pain of mourning a parent; watching her mother’s memories of Lynn’s childhood disintegrate felt like losing a bit of her own history. Lynn provides advice for caregivers ranging from the utilitarian (a chart comparing residential care options) to the personal (thoughts on grieving before the patient dies). Filled with photographs and poems as well as prose, the book won’t replace any comprehensive guide for Alzheimer’s caregivers. But Lynn’s honesty and insight may comfort fellow caregivers.
A brief, moving hybrid work that pays tribute to one woman and her daughter.Pub Date: May 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5043-7513-9
Page Count: 216
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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