A compassionate, cathartic, and searingly intimate chronicle of a crippling condition.
An errant son memorializes the devastating impact of his father’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease.
Acclaimed for his work with inner-city schoolchildren, National Book Award winner Kozol’s (Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America, 2012, etc.) memoir centers around the subsequent fallout of his father’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis at age 88 in 1994. A former Boston-area neurologist with an instructional practice at a Harvard teaching hospital, Dr. Harry Kozol began experiencing memory lapses, “interrupted consciousness,” and confused wandering spells, which he self-diagnosed as progressive brain cortex cell degeneration. The author dutifully retraces his familial ancestry and writes frankly of an all-consuming rebelliousness that estranged him from his father for a time during the 1960s. Later, Kozol’s prolific literary endeavors kept the family distanced further, a situation the author has come to palpably regret in hindsight. While his father’s increasing physical frailty and mental fragmentation eventually forced him into a nursing home, the event, however tragic, provided both men ample time to bond and make up for time lost. A poignant consideration of precious memories, the memoir is also accented by Kozol’s newfound respect for his father’s former sense of “dignity and intellectual engagement” throughout his life, as well as in his profession, an occupation often complicated by the great mental complexities of his patients. As his father’s recognition skills and physical agility faltered further, Kozol fully realized the exhaustive challenge of caretaking for a parent. As a reading experience, the entire ordeal only becomes wearying when Kozol’s mother also begins exhibiting symptoms akin to his father’s rapidly deteriorating lucidity. Readers familiar with the emotional toll exacted by a loved one with Alzheimer’s will embrace Kozol’s nostalgic, often heart-wrenching narrative as an important addition to the genre.
A compassionate, cathartic, and searingly intimate chronicle of a crippling condition.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8041-4097-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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