A compassionate, cathartic, and searingly intimate chronicle of a crippling condition.
An errant son memorializes the devastating impact of his father’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease.
Acclaimed for his work with inner-city schoolchildren, National Book Award winner Kozol’s (Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America, 2012, etc.) memoir centers around the subsequent fallout of his father’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis at age 88 in 1994. A former Boston-area neurologist with an instructional practice at a Harvard teaching hospital, Dr. Harry Kozol began experiencing memory lapses, “interrupted consciousness,” and confused wandering spells, which he self-diagnosed as progressive brain cortex cell degeneration. The author dutifully retraces his familial ancestry and writes frankly of an all-consuming rebelliousness that estranged him from his father for a time during the 1960s. Later, Kozol’s prolific literary endeavors kept the family distanced further, a situation the author has come to palpably regret in hindsight. While his father’s increasing physical frailty and mental fragmentation eventually forced him into a nursing home, the event, however tragic, provided both men ample time to bond and make up for time lost. A poignant consideration of precious memories, the memoir is also accented by Kozol’s newfound respect for his father’s former sense of “dignity and intellectual engagement” throughout his life, as well as in his profession, an occupation often complicated by the great mental complexities of his patients. As his father’s recognition skills and physical agility faltered further, Kozol fully realized the exhaustive challenge of caretaking for a parent. As a reading experience, the entire ordeal only becomes wearying when Kozol’s mother also begins exhibiting symptoms akin to his father’s rapidly deteriorating lucidity. Readers familiar with the emotional toll exacted by a loved one with Alzheimer’s will embrace Kozol’s nostalgic, often heart-wrenching narrative as an important addition to the genre.
A compassionate, cathartic, and searingly intimate chronicle of a crippling condition.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8041-4097-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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