A simply told, moving memoir.
An actress tells the story of how her mother’s dementia changed their relationship and affected their family.
When Williams-Paisley discovered that her mother, Linda, had a rare form of dementia called primary progressive aphasia, she had no idea how much the disease would impact her life. The mother she knew growing up was warm and exuberant, and while the author drifted away from her during a period of teenage rebellion, she always knew that Linda—who firmly supported her daughter’s desire to become an actress—had only the best of intentions. Adulthood and acting success brought Williams-Paisley closer to her mother, who by that time had found her own career success as a fundraiser for nonprofit organizations. But the author’s marriage to country star Brad Paisley created distance between them. The rift soon healed, but that Christmas, her parents revealed to Williams-Paisley and her siblings that Linda had been diagnosed with early-stage dementia. In the year that followed, Linda’s life began to unravel. First came early retirement from her job, followed by increasing problems with memory and speech. Most painful of all were the behavioral changes that transformed a once-vibrant woman into an unpredictable, at-times violent monster no one recognized. Terrified of "New Mom,” who needed “to be treated with care and caution,” Williams-Paisley feared for the safety of her children as well as the well-being of her father. Only after she had worked past the trauma of seeing a loved one transform so completely and the guilt at not being able to offer more assistance was she finally able to make peace with who her mother had become. Heartbreaking but never sentimental, Williams-Paisley’s book offers an intimate look at a family’s struggle with a life-altering disease. It is also a daughter’s tribute to the mother whose disease offered her a new opportunity to “love unconditionally…and practice being comfortable with…[the] uncomfortable.”
A simply told, moving memoir.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90295-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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