A sensitive, affective, and moving chronicle of how a woman with Alzheimer’s has refused to let the disease completely rule...
How a woman’s diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s changed her life.
It crept up on Mitchell gradually as a general feeling of tiredness and a fuzziness to her thinking, then one day, she fell, and a few weeks later, fell again, her coordination definitely off. Cognitive tests revealed the diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s, and Mitchell felt her world slowly slide away in forgotten bits and pieces. In this moving, well-written memoir, Mitchell relates how her life inevitably changed; she went from a person whose work required her to remember tremendous amounts of information to someone who didn’t understand the computer system she had navigated so easily; she needed to leave herself reminders on her phone and notes on the floor to eat and take her medications; she no longer dared drive and felt anxious riding the bus or walking in unknown neighborhoods. Yet, once she was forced to retire, her life was still full; she reached out to others with the same diagnosis, gave talks on the topic, and engaged in research projects that might help someone in the future. Mitchell’s sharing of the personal details of her mental decline helps readers thoroughly understand the scariness and confusion that Alzheimer’s patients go through as they gradually lose the ability to take care of themselves and perform daily tasks that used to be done by rote. She triumphantly shows methods she used to help overcome some of her setbacks so she could continue to live independently, offering others with this disease examples of what can be done. The journey continues to grow harder, but Mitchell obviously refuses to give up, as evidenced by her writing this poignant statement of her life after the diagnosis.
A sensitive, affective, and moving chronicle of how a woman with Alzheimer’s has refused to let the disease completely rule her life.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-9791-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
IN THE NEWS
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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