Three days after terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, David Horowitz discovered that he had prostate cancer. As America was rebuilding, he emerged from months of treatment with a "reprieve" from his disease. He emerged as well with this remarkable book of hard-won insights about how we get to our end and what we learn along the way. A stunning departure from the polemics and social criticism that have made Horowitz one of our most controversial public intellectuals, The End of Time is an unflinching and lyrical meditation on subjects ranging from what parents inadvertently teach us in their deaths, to the forbidding reality of the cancer ward and the way in which figures like Mohammed Atta use death to become gods of their own mad creation. Hovering protectively over these ruminations and Horowitz's personal crisis is his wife, April, whose stubborn love reached into the heart of his medical darkness and led him back toward the light of this work. The End of Time is also about the redemptive power of language and literature. One of the writers appearing here is the Catholic philosopher and scientist Blaise Pascal, whose Pensees functions as Horowitz's model and guide. Citing Pascal's famous observation that "the heart has its reasons which reason does not know," Horowitz writes: "I do not have the faith of Pascal, but I know its feeling. While reason tells me the pictures will stop, I will be unafraid when death comes. I will feel my way toward the horizon in front of me, and my heart will take me home."
"Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary is an intimate, exquisite, and true account of what it is to help a parent die. After her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, former home care worker and writer Rebecca Brown cared for her mother during the last six months of her life. This spare, unsentimental book comes out of that experience. In short chapters headed by definitions of medical terms, she confronts anemia, chemotherapy, metastasis, cremation. Brown's is a poignant and unflinching story of how one family coped with loss and learned about the longevity of love."--BOOK JACKET
"National Book Award winner Jonathan Kozol is best known for his fifty years of work among our nation's poorest and most vulnerable children. Now, in the most personal book of his career, he tells the story of his father's life and work as a nationally noted specialist in disorders of the brain and his astonishing ability, at the onset of Alzheimer's disease, to explain the causes of his sickness and then to narrate, step-by-step, his slow descent into dementia. Dr. Harry Kozol was born in Boston in 1906. Classically trained at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, he was an unusually intuitive clinician with a special gift for diagnosing interwoven elements of neurological and psychiatric illnesses in highly complicated and creative people. "One of the most intense relationships of his career," his son recalls, "was with Eugene O'Neill, who moved to Boston in the last years of his life so my father could examine him and talk with him almost every day." At a later stage in his career, he evaluated criminal defendants including Patricia Hearst and the Boston Strangler, Albert H. DeSalvo, who described to him in detail what was going through his mind while he was killing thirteen women. But The Theft of Memory is not primarily about a doctor's public life. The heart of the book lies in the bond between a father and his son and the ways that bond intensified even as Harry's verbal skills and cogency progressively abandoned him. "Somehow," the author says, "all those hours that we spent trying to fathom something that he wanted to express, or summon up a vivid piece of seemingly lost memory that still brought a smile to his eyes, left me with a deeper sense of intimate connection with my father than I'd ever felt before." Lyrical and stirring, The Theft of Memory is at once a tender tribute to a father from his son and a richly colored portrait of a devoted doctor who lived more than a century"-- "House author Jonathan Kozol's deeply personal biography of his father, a brilliant neurologist who suffered from Alzheimer's.There are few writers of conscience who write as beautifully as Jonathan Kozol.Departing from the South Bronx and turning his sensitive eye to his own life and legacy, The Theft of Memory is Kozol's most personal book to date, as it explores the life of his father, Harry. Dr. Harry L. Kozol was a nationally-renowned neurologist whose work helped establish the emerging fields of forensic psychiatry and neuropsychiatry. He was a remarkable clinician with unusual capacity to diagnose and identify neurological and psychotic illnesses in highly complicated and sophisticated people, including well-known artists, writers, and intellectuals. Notably, in Eugene O'Neill's last years, the playwright moved to Boston so that he could live close to Kozol's father's office. In addition to his successful private practice in Boston, Kozol operated in a grim arena marked by extreme violence. But while his role as a forensic expert placed him in the public eye for high-profile criminal defendants such as Albert DeSalvo (the Boston Strangler) and Patty Hearst, he was--as his son articulates--"a healer of tormented people, not their judge, not their interrogator." With the same lyricism and clarity that have defined Kozol's acclaimed work on education for decades,The Theft of Memory intimately describes Harry's vibrant life, the challenges following his self-diagnosis of Alzheimer's, and the evolution of their relationship throughout. This unique biography will have a long shelf life as a moving portrait of an extraordinary man, a window into the heart of one of our nation's foremost education activists, and a frank examination of how we come to terms with caregiving"--
"Approximately six million people have some form of dementia in North America, and they each have an average of five care partners. This number is growing each year and will continue to grow until a cure is found. There are books that are very clinical and books that are fictional, but 'Dementia in the Family' provides clinical information in lay terms within a true story of how dementia affects not just the person with the disease, but everyone around them. The author's gentle humor offers the reader moments of lightness in what could be a very dark read. Anyone can read and learn from this warm, practical, and all-encompassing book on dementia."--
Includes an explanation and understanding of the four types of child abuse: physical, mental, neglect, and sexual. The author has used all fictional names and omitted the case numbers from quoted court records. It is a memoir, based on her life experiences.
The end of time by David Horowitz | Literally Just Books
