A heartbreaking yet hopeful journey through the painful chaos of a loved one’s compassionate care.
Ronald Reagan’s daughter shares her experience as a caregiver for her Alzheimer’s-stricken father.
For the better part of a decade, writer Davis took care of her father during his gradual cognitive descent into dementia. That experience, documented in her heart-rending book The Long Goodbye (2004), forms the foundation for this guide for providers and family members seeking to provide optimal assistance to their loved one while maintaining self-care. Davis generously shares anecdotes from her painful yet always compassionate tenure with her father as well as experiences from those within the support group she founded in 2011, Beyond Alzheimer’s. Throughout, the author weaves in advice for caregivers to better evaluate unfamiliar situations—e.g., sundowning (“as the day winds down, the person gets worse”)—and to improve reactions to more classic dementia scenarios such as emotional outbursts and disorientation. Though she personally battled isolation, exhaustion, helplessness, and a fear of death, her journey was not without small gifts of positive light. Davis shares buoyant revelations about how her family, fractured by “distance and dissonance,” formed a more closely knit bond even as Reagan’s cognitive and physical health declined. During the blessing of shared time, she also learned more intimate details about her father. The author outlines several unique characteristics and types of dementia, moving from initial onset to the debilitating progressive stages. She encourages readers to obtain an accurate diagnosis and offers suggestions on navigating contentious situations like hiring an outside aide and maintaining safety measures and restrictions. She stresses the importance of avoiding guilt and denial and finding an anchoring support group. “Once you let go of the rope,” she writes, “you have to deal with the waters around you.” Her bracing narrative is a vital supportive resource for anyone navigating the choppy waters of Alzheimer’s within a familial network.
A heartbreaking yet hopeful journey through the painful chaos of a loved one’s compassionate care.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-798-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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