Helpful, sometimes moving insights into a situation many will face.
A compassionate collection of essays examining dementia from an unusually hopeful point of view.
As a Christian minister and chaplain, first-time author Harper has spent considerable time working in assisted living and memory loss facilities with those experiencing varying degrees of dementia. Initially reluctant, like many of us, to deal with older people experiencing the disease, she gradually began to understand those she worked with as complicated people and to think about the many ways in which our misunderstanding of dementia leads us to stop paying attention to those affected by it—to see them as “vanishing” before they actually die. In fact, argues the author, they are vividly alive and sensitive to the presence of others and often capable of increased “compassion, honesty, humility.” In these essays, some of which were published in various journals, Harper explores with an open mind and empathetic imagination the question of why “we—those whom the dementia activist Morris Friedell termed the 'temporarily able-brained’—need them to vanish. Why are we so eager to view them as disappearing or disappeared?” She explores how our often unconscious biases lead us to assume that people are “gone” when they are actually right in front of us, longing for connection. She ponders the possible link between Shakespeare's King Lear and dementia, considers Ralph Waldo Emerson's relatively peaceful encounter with the state, and reflects on her own experience of sleepwalking and the ways it helps her understand dementia. “While I do not presume I can or should know in full the experiences of another,” she writes, “I wondered if sleepwalking might be one point of correspondence.” Harper moves smoothly between abstract reflections and concrete experiences, reflecting often on the effects of dementia on her grandfather and on her relationship with him, her fears that a genetic link to the disease may have been passed down to her, and her encounters with many individuals, all described in strikingly specific terms, surviving dementia in their own ways.
Helpful, sometimes moving insights into a situation many will face.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-948226-28-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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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