Drummond (I Choose to Remember, 2013) offers a smart, highly effective guide to caring for Alzheimer’s patients.
As a nurse who has cared for numerous Alzheimer’s sufferers, Drummond uses her experience to inform her slightly unorthodox methods of dealing with her patients. She opens her book with a jarring introduction from the point of view of someone in the middle stages of Alzheimer’s; she has reverted to her 20s and now believes the doll she’s holding is her child. She tells her companion, “When you see me hold a baby doll as if it is you, you know the love you see in my eyes is real.” This scene sets the stage for the author’s main point: The best communication will occur when meeting the Alzheimer’s patient where he or she is at any given moment. While many health care practitioners employ the “reality orientation” approach, which aims to attune the patient to the proper time and place, Drummond has found that this only adds to the patient’s frustration and confusion; it’s important, she says, to focus on what the patient will respond to, not what the caregiver desires. This might mean laughing at the patient’s joke each time he tells it or assuming the role of daughter when the relationship is actually one of sisters. Drummond admits that this can cause the caretaker to feel unsettled, but it’s a way of respecting the patient’s reality. She suggests that refraining from the instinct to correct the Alzheimer’s patient can help create a more peaceable existence. Looking for what the author calls “opportunities for success” might even enrich the relationship and help mitigate the patient’s depression or social withdrawal. Imbuing these practical tips with wisdom, respect and sensibility, Drummond comes full circle by ending the book with another dramatic circumstance, this one regarding what happened when her own mentor fell prey to the disease.
This slim little gem offers a humane, intelligent alternative way to care for Alzheimer’s patients.
Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 92
Publisher: Angel Tree Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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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