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
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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