A straightforward and curiously uplifting collection of living-with-Alzheimer’s stories.
A writer looks at the many facets of dealing with Alzheimer’s.
In her nonfiction debut, Hergert begins by reminding her readers that the Alzheimer’s journey is not necessarily a grim, exclusively downhill slide into darkness but rather “a jumble of events and feelings that shift from moment to moment.” The author is personally familiar with that jumble; in the early 2000s, her husband, Ralph, began showing unmistakable signs that something was wrong with his memory and cognition. His condition worsened over the years to the point where, at the time of her writing this book, he was being cared for in a nursing facility. Hergert distills her long experience into alphabet form, starting with “A is for Activities” and ending with “Z is for Zest.” In each of these segments, the author combines clinical observations about the nature of Alzheimer’s and its progression with personal lessons learned from her time with Ralph. The “O” chapter, for instance, turns on the word “overwrought” and talks about how Alzheimer’s sufferers often become distraught and start ranting when confronted with ordinary routines they once enjoyed. (Ralph would yell and lash out when water from the shower hit his face, and he took to rambling aimlessly in the house, worrying Hergert that he would make it out the front door and wander around the neighborhood.) Many of these chapters are shot through with humor despite their grim tidings; in “K,” for example, the author recalls a neurologist’s commenting early on that Ralph was still “moderately kempt.” Although this was a foretelling of things to come, Hergert notes that she and Ralph laughed about the word for years. The unpredictability of the alphabetical approach facilitates these shifts of mood and tone; it works to remind readers that Alzheimer’s is an odyssey, one with many ordinary and even some funny moments. Readers dealing with Alzheimer’s will take great encouragement from the many “joy in the moment” tales the author relates.
A straightforward and curiously uplifting collection of living-with-Alzheimer’s stories.Pub Date: March 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4808-5964-7
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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