A poignant love story with a powerful message.
Geoffrey Beene Foundation Alzheimer’s Initiative CEO Comer offers an unvarnished account of her experience as her husband's caretaker after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
The author has testified before Congress, and she is a founding member of USAgainstAlzheimer's, a co-founder of Women Against Alzheimer's Network and a recipient of the 2005 Shriver Profiles in Dignity Award and the 2007 Proxmire Award. Comer, who spent more than 30 years in broadcast journalism, shares the painful reality of witnessing her husband’s decline over the past 20 years. Harvey Gralnick was chief of hematology and oncology at the National Institutes of Health, internationally recognized for his work on leukemia. When Comer and Gralnick married in 1978, both of their careers were on an upward trajectory. Twenty years later, at the age of 58, he was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. His decline was rapid, as he became increasingly forgetful and at times abusive. For several years before, it had become apparent to Comer and her husband’s colleagues that something was wrong, although he denied a problem and refused medical help. Comer chronicles her own confusion and frustration with his behavior. Finally, Gralnick was forced to resign his position, and it became impossible for Comer to maintain her own career while caring for him at home. The author explains why she gives a detailed chronicle of the painful reality of her situation as a caretaker: “I never wanted to embellish or soften the edges around the truth. It does not do justice to the cruelty of the disease.” Comer has become an advocate for the need for early diagnosis and treatment for Alzheimer's, which is “pushing past cancer and HIV/AIDS as “the most critical public health problem of our times.”
A poignant love story with a powerful message.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-213082-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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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