Cooney tells it all with a fine and rare mix of black humor and bleak honesty.
Novelist Cooney (Shangri-La, 1996, etc.) paints a harrowing portrait of the devastation Alzheimer’s wreaks not just on the victim but on those closest to her.
“Hip, cool, brilliant, funny, sane,” Mary Durant was transformed by the blight of Alzheimer’s into a demented creature who nearly destroyed her daughter’s life. When it became clear that Durant’s mind was going, Cooney moved her mother from Connecticut to California to care for her. The initial plan, for Durant to live alone in a nearby apartment, proved impossible. Cooney then converted her garage into a residence for her mother, but this too became unworkable, and the long search began for an adequate, affordable live-in care facility. Durant’s violent behavior caused her to be evicted from one home and judged unacceptable by others. Even with the help of Cooney’s partner Mitch, who had once been a nursing-home inspector, finding the right place was a long and grueling process. As she chronicles Durant’s increasing dementia and its devastating effects on her own life (she turned in anguish to Valium and vodka), Cooney weaves in glimpses of happier days. Durant was a respected writer—the inclusion of an unpublished short story in the appendix is an unexpected bonus—and young Eleanor took great pride in her glamorous mother’s beauty and accomplishments. During her privileged childhood among artists and writers in Connecticut, Alexander Calder’s studio was her playroom, and Arthur Miller was a neighbor. The contrast between this golden past and a present marked by frustration, anger, resentment, and fatigue makes the destructive force of Alzheimer’s a vivid reality. Anyone assuming that Alzheimer’s victims live in a happy, mindless state will discover here that on the contrary they are often agitated, confused, miserable, and angry, and that those who loved the person he or she once was are likely to find themselves pushed to the limits of endurance.
Cooney tells it all with a fine and rare mix of black humor and bleak honesty.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-621396-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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