5 comments about On Any Given Day.

1. Mr. Martin's book is an inspirational and moving work for anyone to read, regardless of your position in life. If you've ever faced adversity, there is something to be learned about courage and optimism from this book. His candor, humor, and vision will inspire you and give you a sense of appreciation for this life we have. My mother is suffering from a degenerative disease, and this book gave me a new sense of perpective on what she and many others face as they battle each step of their disease. As a North Carolinian, I am proud that this brilliant writer and powerful soul is a leader for our community, and has been able to reach out and touch so many other lives. This book will make you cry, make you laugh, and most importantly, give you inspiration and appreciation for what you have.



2. I cannot add much to the previous reviews-- all of with which I agree-- except this: Mr. Martin is, first and foremost, a writer. Indeed, he has ALS, and that is much of what he writes about here. But his lean, athletic style, keen observation and outstanding sense of humor would entice me to read router bit catalog copy, if Mr. Martin wrote it. I'm in search of his short story published in the Crescent Review (malcolm@walkaboutpress.org-- if anyone finds it first) and am hopeful he is at work on something else for us to enjoy and think about.



3. Like another reviewer, I also have the pleasure of knowing Joe Martin. And while I knew of some of his remarkable achievements, I was astounded to read of many more. Like Joe, I have ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease. He, and his book, have inspired me to live life with joy, love, purpose, hope and faith notwithstanding the ravages of this disease. His book, like Tuesdays With Morrie, should inspire anyone and everyone. But while Morrie spoke as a dying man, Joe, with the same terminal illness, speaks with the vitality of a man truly living life to the fullest.

   Laura Murphy Atlanta, Ga.




4. I found this first person account co-authored by Joe Martin, who has ALS, very inspirational. Joe allows the reader to share his feelings of frustration as well as to grasp the depth of his convictions that life should be celebrated and cherished. Ross Yocke's commentary throughout the book provides an additional source of information which is helpful for the reader to gain perspective about Joe Martin's life with ALS. This short 178 page book pulls the reader into Joe Martin's reality, and allows the reader to share his religious and moral convictions, as well as to revel in his wonderful anecdots. This book reminds me of Tuesdays with Morrie. I hope others will enjoy reading On Any Given Day as much as I have.



5. Joe Martin and his family (family, friends and bank colleagues) are the greatest support system. Joe's life inspires, challenges and motivates all to do more. His will to live is refreshing, unbelievable given the impact of ALS on his body but not on his mind or spirit. For anyone facing disease, stress or looking for meaning, this is a must read.

   It's a quick read and doesn't leave you down -- but instead deals with a tough subject -- living with a terminal disease -- with reality and purpose. You will learn how "you can live like this"

No comments about Twentieth Century Men in Medicine: Personal Reflections.

5 comments about Finding the Joy in Alzheimer's: Caregivers Share the Joyful Times (Finding the Joy in Alzheimer's).

1. Witnessing my mother?s abilities and personality whither away from Alzheimer?s has been difficult. Comfort and advice from friends, family and the medical community has helped, and so has reading Brenda Avadian?s brilliantly conceived and constructed book, Finding the Joy in Alzheimer?s. Discovering what others have experienced and learned in similar circumstances-?particularly the heartfelt reflections of joy?-has enabled me to see my mother and her disease in a new, brighter light. Highly recommended.



2. I was so thrilled to see a collection of experiences from other people, similar to mine. My Dad suffered from Alzheimers and I felt like a freak for having reflected on the illness with a smile. For me, this horrific disease showed me a man that I never knew growing up. All of his barriers were broken down and I got to know, not only who my Dad was, but who I was. I have such a joy from knowing this that it is hard for me to be bitter about that which stole my father, for at the same time, it allowed me to know the father I never knew before.

   It is stories like this that the author has compiled here. Many humorous, many touching, all showing a connection where many think none could be found. Yes, there is a time when the people we know and love so dearly are robbed from us by this devastating disease, but through the process there are many joyous times to be had.

   Read this book and you'll understand




3. I'm an older (born 12/12/1952) Internet user, so--in spite of all of those reassuring, little, gold padlocks shown at the bottom of ordering pages at online stores--I still wasn't ready to put my main credit card or checking account information out in Cyberspace. So, I came up with a doable solution, creating an account for just this very purpose.

   If purchasing this book wasn't actually my FIRST venture into the unfamiliar territory of online shopping (and I'm almost 100% sure that it was), it came pretty close.

   Venturing out into this unfamiliar territory has had more positives than negatives for me--but there's that unfamiliar territory that is among the worst nightmares of both patients and caregivers: dealing with Alzheimer's Disease.

   I had been reading the online letters that Debbie Center had been writing to a mother who would never again have the comprehension to read them--so, these letters were more for Debbie than her mother. And more for helping others who might read those letters to cope should something like this happen in their families.

   One day, in an IM conversation, Debbie shared her sadness with me that her mother was rapidly going downhill, and she felt helpless to stop it from happening--yet, she also had the great news that she would have a part in this book.

   And that's the thread running through this book: the moments of joy found within the Alzheimer's experience.

   The people who have contributed to this book are people who mourn the slipping away of those people--generally, parents and spouses--who were once so vibrant and alert.

   Yet, these same people have learned to find joy and comfort in some of the simple things of life, such as unexpected smiles, words, and laughter from their loved ones.

   In one case, a family--who had gotten out of contact due to distance and schedules--began a tradition of having annual family reunions due to wanting to get everybody together while the matriarch of the family could still recognize and enjoy them.

   Open this book and share the lives of those in this difficult and unfamiliar territory--and share those special moments of joy that make it all worthwhile!!!




4. Finding The Joy In Alzheimer's: Caregivers Share The Joyful Times by Brenda Avadian is a comforting, spiritually healing book filled with touches of wry humor and a serious understanding of the difficulties of Alzheimer's, and how important it is to find and treasure wondrous moments when caring for someone afflicted with this debilitating neurological disease. Finding The Joy In Alzheimer's is not intended to be a source of advice about the legal, physical, or medical difficulties of Alzheimer's disease; rather it was written to bolster the souls and spirits of those charged with caregiving responsibilities for loved ones suffering from the ravages of Alzheimers. As such, it emphatically succeeds in its mission and intention.



5. (...) The stories and poems are so sweet and heartwarming. When you get so deeply involved in this disease, you tend to become isolated; you think you are the only one who is going through this. Ms. Avadian's selection of stories gives the reader a lighthearted look into the trials and tribulations of caregiving, all the while letting the readers see what they are experiencing is no different from what they are reading. From the poem "CareGiver," to the stories of "I've got rocks in my head," or "Do you take...in sickness and in health...I do," or "Ice cream never tasted so good," and yes even "Family of Friends," the reader immediately feels love and support. With all the technical/clinical books that are available on Alzheimer's, it is absolutely refreshingly wonderful to have humor to help heal the caregiver's heart!

1 comments about Diary for the Years 1595-1601 of Dr. John Dee.

1. Dee was an intensely pious Christian, but his Christianity was deeply influenced by the Hermetic and Platonic-Pythagorean doctrines that were pervasive in the Renaissance. He believed that number was the basis of all things and the key to knowledge, that God's creation was an act of "numbering".
   
   From Hermeticism, he drew the belief that man had the potential for divine power, and he believed this divine power could be exercised through mathematics. His cabalistic angel magic (which was heavily numerological) and his work on practical mathematics (navigation, for example) were simply the exalted and mundane ends of the same spectrum, not the antithetical activities many would see them as today.
   
   His ultimate goal was to help bring forth a unified world religion through the healing of the breach of the Catholic and Protestant churches and the recapture of the pure theology of the ancients.
   
   One can capture the essence of Dee in his Diary and can truly see inside the mind of this amazing man. It is written in Olde English, so you must appreciate that fact and that is a very rare reprint only recently made available through Kessinger Publishing copied from a very old manuscript.

No comments about Epilepsy In Our Lives: Women Living with Epilepsy (The Brainstorms Series).

4 comments about Love, Ruth: A Son's Memoir.

1. The host for the bookclub I'm in, choose this book as our 'read' for last month. We all enjoyed it, but for different reasons. I enjoyed reading about the information about his mother that Mr. Lovett was presented with & were it came from. My friend Pat has been inspired to search out information about her birth mother. Not to only find out what her birth mother was like, but to get health records & etc. We all were impressed that this very touching book was written by a man. How wonderful to read something this sensitive that is written by the gender whom usually prides themselves to be 'tough as nails'. We all agree that sensitive men are the best! We all live in a small town (Kernersville) that is located about 10 miles from Winston-Salem. We are planning to go see if we can find the house that he grew up in next time we are in W-S. Authors can have 'groupies' too!



2. This book deserves to be a real "sleeper" hit -- it's a remarkable read, both for its content and its honest presentation. The story of the author's quest to "know" the mother he never really knew starts off as a modern, suburban detective story of sorts, and along the way becomes something much more profound. The author's direct, no-nonsense narrative makes you feel like you're at his side for each new revelation. Some discoveries made me smile and nod with recognition of similarities to my own family, and some left me much more deeply moved; I think anyone who reads this book will have the same experience. This book would probably be a great gift for someone in your own family.



3. An engrossing account of a young man's quest to know the mother he lost to cancer at the age of two. He searchs for his mother through stories of friends and relatives, through official documents and medical records, through mementos and snippets of information gleaned from old correspondence. Charles Lovett's story of this journey will touch a place in all of us. It is a story of profound loss and the courage to face that loss and come out on the other side, whole and with a peaceful heart.



4. Love, Ruth was a great read! It not only touched me and made me re-examine my relationships with both my parents and my children, but it was well written and compelling-a real page turner. It tells the story of the author's clever search for information about his dead mother and how that search leads him to a closer relationship with his daughter. I would highy recommend it to other readers! - Elizabeth Blakeman, Greensboro,NC

No comments about But What If She Wants to Die?: A Husband's Diary.

5 comments about Bettelheim: A Life And A Legacy.

1. The Uses of Enchantment (Penguin Psychology)
   
   First, it is good to get all evidence and opinion out and above board. This should be true of everyone no matter if one is an ethnical or religious person Jew or Christian. Then, there is a matter of how this should be done? Where it should be done? When it should be done? Why? For instance, if persons or person passionate few agrieved against a group or political body they should attack prudently but immediately. Strike when the iron is hot as the old adage goes. No time to waste! Whistle blowing on companies are best done by individual(s) when their is enough information and evidence to find guilty in a court of law. And so should it be with doctors and hospitals, persons and people of positions of extra-ordinary trust and power over others. Not only for the patient-personal reasons but so the rest of us can be aware of malpratice and the knowledge that all that is white and professional fascade is NOT okay. Put on guard by those who are insiders. However, and this is how the case of trying to destroy the reputation and thereby Dr. Bettelheim was done, it was done long after the fact, after the doctor was dead(and as it handily happened for his detractors by his own hand) and in such a dramatic concerted media trial like ganging



2. I simply wish to say that there would no controversy if thoughtful, sensitive people were in control of their own emotions and were objective enough to put Bruno Bettelheim and his times in perspecitve. This is one of the implicit themes of the book.The author, a journalist, has study the facts and has the intuition to understand as much as any biographer can at this time a complex suffering personality. I hope only that the time will come when such a understanding can be objectively drawn. But meanwhile the biographer has made at least this attentive and by no means unskeptical reader understand the controversy and the facts of the case are not always one and the same...



3. The reviewers who praised this book didn't check the facts and neither did the author. In fact, the book is highly inaccurate both in its facts and conclusions. The book merely applies the same pseudopsychoanalysis as the subject applied to his "patients," including me.

   I was a source for the book and nearly everything in it about me is totally wrong. I shared considerable information with the author following a 1990 article in the Washington Post I wrote detailing Bettelheim's unsupported claims and physical and psychological abuse of his wards. The author promised that I could control anything that appeared in the book about me. But the book came out with all sorts of unsourced untruths about me that the author never bothered to check with me. From the looks of them, I suspect some she made up and some she heard from Bettelheim's defenders who worked at the school and broke their professional code of silence to reveal "information" about a "patient." It evidently never occured to the author that these people may have wanted to smear me to save their own reputations. The author even had the nerve to state as fact how I was feeling, which is amazing because she never asked me. In fact, I never felt the way she said I felt.

   The book just amounted to the same type of Freudian nonsense I was subject to at Bettleheim's school -- someone else telling you that you don't feel what you feel -- you really feel what I tell you you feel. The book even managed to completely misrepresent what I wrote in the Washington Post. I have been quoted in many publiciations on this and other matters but I have never seen anything so far from the truth. The author didn't like my thesis and couldn't get me on the facts, so she apparently made up her own.

   Immediately upon the book's publication, I notified the publisher by letter of the book's errors, but the publisher never corrected them in subsequent printings. And no one even had the decency to answer my letter. To this very day, the company continues to sell a book it knows is inaccurate.




4. This book moved me deeply. Not only did it tell me a fascinating story about a man whose life span the century, but it moved me deeply. It's not a funny book, but it is a riveting one. Rather than pretending to know it all, the author takes her reader on an investigative journey: Who was the true Bettelheim? She shares her doubts as well as her discoveries some of which I shall never forget. And in the end, everything seems to fall into place - the good, the bad, everything human, I guess.



5. As a former student at Dr. Bettelheim's school in Chicago, I found this book to be very inadaquate in its description of Dr. Bettelheim. This man did a great deal of harm to the students attending this school and was not the savior which Ms. Sutten would like him to be potrayed as. His methods of treatment can be compared with how the German Nazis treated their concentration camp victims. He did beat the students a great deal and fear was a common, shared, feeling which most of the kids felt towards him. His use of imtimadation towards the children, as well as the staff, was complete. Since Ms. Sutton was not a student at the Orthogenic School, of course she would not know the things that went on there. If Bettelheim was alive today, he would be arrested for child abuse, and this is a fact that Ms. Sutton doesn't want to admit.

5 comments about The Nurses Story.

1. I read this book 18 years ago and it made an impression on me. Over the years I've thought about the book over and over again--the different stories, the people, the morals, etc. I think about the socialite with breast cancer and the dilemma of administering a fatal dose of morphine to a patient in pain. This is a book that definitely stays with you.



2. I found this book at a goodwill store, at first expecting not to find anything at all. I bought it for a dollar then started reading it just to check it out, but then found myself deeply attached to it. My mother is a nurse and the only reason this book got my attention on the shelf was because I wanted a narrative true story of what her life *must be like* at work. All in all, this is a very well-written book.
   **Someone above made a comment about her home life story not being "worth a reader's time," but hey, it's reality and I didn't expect her to start telling stories of her glass slipper or eating a poisoned apple. Anyone with compassion would understand what she's been through (especially waiting anxiously for her husband to return before she realizes she's been abandoned again and again) and and the only reason it doesn't sound "exciting" (to some readers) is because she obviously skipped more painful and complicated details. Any reader should be able to understand that. And isn't this a story about *nurses* after all?
   Anyway, the book is amazing. It opened my eyes a little to what nurses really go through and what they have to do to keep their sanity. It made me understand my mother's work more. It is one of the toughest jobs out there and the author definitely gives us a great & down-to-earth tour of her journey. Go ahead and read it. You'll laugh and cry.



3. The people that this nurse treated were very interesting but some of the stories of her home life are less than exciting and not worth a reader's time.



4. "The Nurse's Story" is a book about patients. Carol Gino tells about her years of nursing without writing a book about herself. Instead, she focuses on her patients, on their courage, pain, and the lessons they pass on to all of us. In "The Nurses Story" we see nursing rise above science. Ms. Gino makes this a book about caretaking, a book we can all use to aid in our own healing.



5. This novel tells the tale of a nurse and her life in a way that has had me laughing and crying throughout the story. The characters became so real to me I could hardly put the book down. I really felt for them. The way I view the field of medicine since reading this book has drastically changed.

No comments about The Making of an American Psychologist: An Autobiography (Jossey Bass Social and Behavioral Science Series).