Helpful, sometimes moving insights into a situation many will face.
A compassionate collection of essays examining dementia from an unusually hopeful point of view.
As a Christian minister and chaplain, first-time author Harper has spent considerable time working in assisted living and memory loss facilities with those experiencing varying degrees of dementia. Initially reluctant, like many of us, to deal with older people experiencing the disease, she gradually began to understand those she worked with as complicated people and to think about the many ways in which our misunderstanding of dementia leads us to stop paying attention to those affected by it—to see them as “vanishing” before they actually die. In fact, argues the author, they are vividly alive and sensitive to the presence of others and often capable of increased “compassion, honesty, humility.” In these essays, some of which were published in various journals, Harper explores with an open mind and empathetic imagination the question of why “we—those whom the dementia activist Morris Friedell termed the 'temporarily able-brained’—need them to vanish. Why are we so eager to view them as disappearing or disappeared?” She explores how our often unconscious biases lead us to assume that people are “gone” when they are actually right in front of us, longing for connection. She ponders the possible link between Shakespeare's King Lear and dementia, considers Ralph Waldo Emerson's relatively peaceful encounter with the state, and reflects on her own experience of sleepwalking and the ways it helps her understand dementia. “While I do not presume I can or should know in full the experiences of another,” she writes, “I wondered if sleepwalking might be one point of correspondence.” Harper moves smoothly between abstract reflections and concrete experiences, reflecting often on the effects of dementia on her grandfather and on her relationship with him, her fears that a genetic link to the disease may have been passed down to her, and her encounters with many individuals, all described in strikingly specific terms, surviving dementia in their own ways.
Helpful, sometimes moving insights into a situation many will face.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-948226-28-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
