Another great review on the Library Journal.... This book does not offer the usual clinical view of Alzheimer’s. It is a first-person journey, as exhilarating as it is exhausting, into Alzheimer’s by a gifted writer as he is taking it—with his mother. “My mother and I were on corresponding tracks,” writes the former Cape Codder editor. “She was years ahead of me, but I could see her in the distance, not sure where she was…. We walked together in a collective denial until the bus for Pluto arrived.” The bus arrived when it did, ironically, owing to her. No longer “getting” weather, she made O’Brien wear a sweatshirt in 80° heat. When he later threw it over his bike handlebars, it caught in the spokes, causing him to crash and sustain a head wound, which hastened his own Alzheimer’s. “Unleashing” in him her “monster,” she tried to help by pouring antiseptic on his bandages. He let her as “she was my mother, even in her Alzheimer’s, and I desperately wanted to be her son. I hope my children, as the disease progresses, will allow me to be their father. It is vital for those with Alzheimer’s to connect with the past…Parallel universes between my mother and me collided…. We were over the handlebars.” VERDICT: O’Brien finds wisdom despite a “walking nightmare” of a life. It is impossible to imagine any reader feeling unmoved.—Cynthia Fox, Brooklyn
Posted on: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 19:31:40 +0000