Engaging, honest, and poignant and a worthy addition to the burgeoning Alzheimer’s literature.
A debut memoir that presents a realistic view of the challenges faced by baby boomers responsible for elderly parents.
When it came time for Turner and her husband, Bob, to move his mother, 88-year-old Mollie, into their “dream house” near Orlando, Florida, the author approached the task enthusiastically. Turner, in her early 60s at the time, had always had a close, loving relationship with her in-law. Mollie was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, but the author had taken a seminar and collected information ahead of time, so she was confident that she could provide the sort of nurturing environment for Mollie that Bob’s three sisters no longer could. She had no idea that the experience would knock her totally off her game, setting up an internal battle between “good Sherry” and “bad Sherry” as she tried to overcome frustration and anger. This is the story of the last three years of Mollie’s life and of Turner’s personal struggle to reconcile her own expectations with difficult, day-to-day frustrations. For the author, it became a lesson in humility and acceptance. Her smooth, present-tense, often self-deprecating prose brings readers directly into her moments of triumph and defeat. Even when “bad Sherry” rears her snarky head, readers know that Turner loved her mother-in-law, who was sweet and loved singalongs; she even had total recall of the words and music of her favorite songs. She also skillfully recounted stories from her youth and young adulthood. But Turner also makes her short-term memory issues clear. In one vividly described incident, the author took her in-law to a big-band concert, where she joyfully sang along. But while talking about the concert just minutes later, Mollie said wistfully: “Oh, I would love to have seen that....Can I go with you next time?” The author also tells how she learned to cherish positive moments; as her husband told her, “You can’t make her better....We want her time with us...her last years, to be pleasant; and you are doing all that you can to achieve that.”
Engaging, honest, and poignant and a worthy addition to the burgeoning Alzheimer’s literature.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5355-8124-0
Page Count: 234
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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