2 comments about I Remain in Darkness.

1. Alzheimer's is a cruel disease for those who have it and even more cruel for those who know the sufferers. Everyone who knows someone who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's should read this book to prepare themselves for the experiences ahead. You'll need all of your strength and preparation!

   The title is the last sentence the author's mother wrote before she died. One of the frightening aspects of the disease is watching the person discover the loss of faculties, as they occur. Soon, you are not recognized, and the person can lose all of their possessions. They may have to be tied down to keep them from wandering off and getting hurt. Physical deterioration is often not far behind.

   The book is a series of notes the author made on occasions when she was with her mother from January 1984 through April 1986, and includes a few days after her mother's death.

   You will find a lot of pain here. The author finds that she is revolted by the affliction, at how her mother changes, by the memories she has of things she should not have done, and in her own reactions to her mother's changes. As a result, there's a lot of guilt and remorse to deal with. By reading how Ms. Ernaux went through this, you may have an easier time forgiving yourself if you are subject to the same feelings in the future.

   The book is filled with pretty direct stories and references to things that can be upsetting: People exposing themselves, getting sores in private places, human excretion, unpleasant smells and sights, and rough language. You will hear, see, feel, smell, and taste what the author experienced. In this area, I found the translation a little strange at times. Several crude words would be used, then a reference would be made that seemed to be employing a euphemism for a more direct word. Is the translation more or less crude than the author intended? I don't know.

   The reason I did not give the book five stars is that it could really use a little more perspective than just the notes. Apparently, the experience was so painful that the author decided to let the notes speak for themselves. Perhaps in the future, Ms. Ernaux will choose to revisit this work, and put it into more context.

   Is this work contrived by a fine writer, or is it simple human drama? I'm inclined to think it is the latter. Few would portray themselves and their mother this way simply to entertain readers. I could feel the searing pain as I read the entries. I think you will, too.




2. Annie Ernaux is an author whose appeal is difficult to define - she writes autobiographical prose that is sparse, clear, honest and a bit hard. In her very particular experience, she writes prose that is emotionally universally true.

   The mother we meet in "I Remain in Darkness" is a very different woman than we met in "A Woman's Place". The strong woman previously depicted descends into dependence. Written in the form of a dated journal, Ms. Ernaux traces her mother's descent into Alzheimer's - first recognizing that her mother can no longer live alone, she moves her mother in with her; this is followed by the recognition that she can no longer care for her mother; finally, her mother dies in a nursing home.

   A simple and common experience. But Annie Ernaux in a slim volume captures the changing emotions that follow the changes in her mother's situation in a way few authors can.

No comments about Mania or Miracles?.

4 comments about The Most Precious Gift.

1. This is not a clinical account of a kidney transplant. Rather, it is a very personal account of the author's experience with his sister back in the 1070s. Back then, such transplants were not nearly as common as today. The author recounts the toll his sister's kidney disease had on the entire family and what the family went through both before the surgery and in the remaining decades of his sister's life. One minor criticism, the author does not state which hospital the surgery took place in. I am interested in such details. Nonetheless, this is a very moving personal account of how the donor, recipient and family coped with kidney diseaes, the transplant and it's aftermath.



2. This true story is told in a gentle, caring manner, and is easy to read for both young and old alike. Lawrence Liebling reflects on the conflict that he encounters about a decision that will not only impact on his life, but on his sister's and family's life forever. This story is about love, faith, courage and trust that every reader can relate to. It gives the reader a chance to reflect on his/her values. The author ultimately conveys the power of love through his story. Liebling's sensitivity and insights are meaningful, and touch the heart. The reader will reflect on the meaning of life and relationships, laugh and cry, and be touched by this beautiful story.



3. I read this most sensitive book about the lives of both a brother who donated his kidney and his sister who was the recepient. The book reveals how the transplant effected both of their lives. This is a timely book since there are many more transplants today than when they went thru their ordeal. The book should be read by those who are about to be a donor, and those who will be a recepient. In addition it should be read by any close relatives and friends. There are many sensitive,revealing and beautiful passages The book was well written by Mr Liebling and is easy to read.

   .




4. Liebling writes with warmth and depth on a most difficult subject: donating a kidney to his sister. It is a surprisingly easy read for such a topic.

4 comments about God Gave Us a Promise: The Story of a Little Fighter.

1. God Gave Us A Promise: The Story of a Little Fighter by Phillip Wolf is the candid and intimate testimony of his own family when an infant son was born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. Their son's diagnosis changed their lives as the cruel realities of this devastating condition forced them to trust in love, God's faith, and the essence of human compassion to survive the difficult choices ahead. A powerful and profoundly moving remembrance, God Gave Us A Promise is remarkable and recommended reading.



2. Normally I wouldn't call non-fiction "entertaining," but Phillip Wolf does a great job telling of the struggles facing a home that welcomes in a child with congential heart disease. I laughed in many places at the antics of Phil and his friends, and I cried in many others. Even knowing how things had to end ahead of time, I still kept hoping for a miracle. An outstanding performance by this author.



3. Guaranteed to make you want to hold your kids a little tighter. Told with raw emotion and an unblinking eye. Should be very helpful to any parent whose child has this complication, and a portion of the proceeds from the sale of the book go to the Loma Linda University Children's Hospital Fund.



4. I am pleased to share my thoughts with you about this heartwarming book about love and how complete love is. I recently read "God Gave Us a Promise". I was incredibly moved by the love and dedication that Jeremiah, Patience and Phil Wolf shared for life. Their story is an awesome story that reminds each and every one who reads it just how precious and short life truly is.

   There were many tears and many smiles as I made my way through this book. You will laugh at the cute and cunning ways that Jeremiah got what he wanted. You will laugh at the times that Patience and Phil bounced off of each other, much like "who's on first". It warms your heart to see the teamwork that this marriage truly possesses. You will cry as you feel the pain in their hearts as they pray that God will carry them and Jeremiah to a safe place where there is no more pain.

   "God Gave Us a Promise" is one of the best books that I have read. It reminded me that I have so much to be grateful for. It also made me realize that the love a parent feels for a child knows no boundaries. God always works all things for his good. Jeremiah has touched many lives that only God could have known he would. Jeremiah will live in many hearts forever. He certainly is in mine.

1 comments about Invisible Illnesses and Disabilities.

1. The earlier edition of this book was written under (I presume) Sharon Smith Merrit's maiden name. There are several excellent reviews for this book under this same title; author Sharon Smith

No comments about Story of My Life (Signet Classics).

No comments about Playing from the Heart.

1 comments about Little Girl.

1. $50 for a paperback from a vanity publisher? What the &^%_?

No comments about Connecticut Moon.

5 comments about A Book of Reasons.

1. In The Age of Grief the writer Jane Smiley refers to that moment when "the barriers between the circumstances of oneself and of the rest of the world have broken down." A similar dawning pervades John Vernon's autobiographical A Book of Reasons. When his older brother Paul dies of an aneurysm, Vernon finds himself saddled with the responsibility of his sibling's estate. He must rehabilitate a house crammed with refuse and the sickening stench of dead pets and their sickening stench, as he tries to comprehend how Paul's life devolved into dilapidation.
   
   Vernon quests for reasons: how could a man perceived as an eccentric sociopath at most, fall to a state that could only be described as animalistic? Though the book's time frame is the three-month period between Paul's death and the dissolution of his estate, the author manages an exhumation of some 40-odd years in a struggle to reconstruct their lives together and apart.
   
   As the author contends with his grief and the practical aspects of the house's cleanup, he finds a coping mechanism: a consideration of items and commonplace occurrences. Buying a thermometer at Wal-Mart conjures a lengthy discourse on the history of temperature measurement. The purchase of equipment needed to build a simple set of stairs fuels a meditation on tools and how their evolution paralleled that of man and animals. Vernon reaches back through the ages to expound on how the contributions of Galileo, Pascal, Robert Fludd and many others shaped our understanding of how the present world came to be. The reader is treated to various insights ranging from how rocks were employed as hammers by Homo sapiens, to the murder of Abel by Cain with a weapon, or "tools that got to be weapons by being misused."
   
   It's a seesaw, really: over here, the life of Paul alongside the author's guilt, incredulity and dormant memory; over there, a timeless world with its theories, speculations and advances. Both carry a long circuitous chain of reasons or "recipes for making sense of the world's arrangements and accidents."
   
   The bulk of the work is unapologetically nonlinear, containing a larger ratio of science to actual memoir. Yet the author's brother is always there, haunting either a discourse on the history of internment or the origin of central heating back in 80 B.C. For readers who prefer straightforward memoir, these flights may prove a distraction from what is essentially a compelling look at sibling estrangement. But these technical flights never feel clinical or even detached. Vernon's wounded, probing voice holds it together nicely, whether the subject is the Big Bang, or the circumstances that led to the appearance of nine-year-old Paul's photo on the front page of the Worcester Telegram and Gazette.
   In melding science to the personal, he illuminates a universe that's become as vague to us as his brother was to him, while reminding us that context is everything. At one point Vernon says that he somehow fell asleep while the brother's life plummeted, an observation that might parallel our relation to the world. Everything is moving too fast goes the song; Vernon's insistence on examining the implications of the everyday is an invitation to cease all our taking for granted.
   
   Vernon entreats us with trenchant description and the use of metaphor. He describes the ritual of bathing after Paul: "This is how I cleaned myself: by lowering my body into Paul's gray opacity rimmed with a sort of soapy pond scum." The automobile looms as a vehicle of escape from the grief that the house represents, but also the seat of memory and revelation: an incident in their teens where he and Paul are humiliated by an aggressive motorist parallels the author's recent discovery of Paul's Duke Ellington CDs under the passenger seat.
   
   At one point, Vernon asks, "Was his life a waste of life?" Paul's obsession with pornography, his ham radio and the Internet were "amusements...of solitude and boredom." His preoccupations with instruments of communication are symbolic of a desperate man pining for an elusive acceptance. As Paul sits glued to the computer in pathetic self-exile, Vernon makes ineffectual stabs at conversation: "He looked up only if I stood in the doorway, and eventually I did--out of fraternal duty or to torture us both, I'm not sure which."
   
   And there lies regret: ultimately, Reasons is atonement for a missed opportunity, though its lack of resolution leaves not solace, but an aching sadness. Paul's disintegration becomes one more mystery of life that Vernon, unlike the intrepid Robert Fludd or Jane Goodall, can't crack. In resigning himself, Vernon tellingly muses that "to be fully conscious of everything, of course, from the rivers of microorganisms we breathe in and out to the history of the shoehorn, would be a form of insanity." That statement's lesson - that the world and our loved ones occasionally escape our grasp - strikes to the heart of this work's disquieting power.



2. Since we live in a democracy, readers like Jude Schmidt of Rockton, Illinois, USA, are free to share their views on literature with one and all. I'll try to be charitable and say he's simply the wrong reader for this book. Unfortunately, though, anyone coming to have a look A Book of Reasons will be tainted by his misinformation. As a writer friend of mine says, "You get a terrific review in the Times and it seems to disappear overnight, but some dim bulb writes in to Amazon and the comments stay forever and a day."

   The fact is, John Vernon's, A Book of Reasons is a lovely and penetrating work. It doesn't easily fall into a genre-except perhaps personal essay or meditation. A few of the other reviewers below describe it well, so I'll simply add that it's constantly surprising, luminous in its sentence craft, informed by a close reading of dozens of other texts-history, biology, cosmology, poetry (his fascinating list of "works consulted" runs to twelve pages). And he avoids the easy pieties that often creep into memoirs. I'm enriched for having spent time with Vernon's mind and heart.

   I ran into this book totally by accident-it was adjacent to something I was looking for in the Tacoma Public Library. Schmidt notes that he had a hard time finding it at major bookstores and department stores-but think of what he could find there, all the hot sellers, and the books that are just like all the other books. I want to weep when I think of the beautiful and different works like Vernon's that fall through the cracks. Whoever reads this review, take a chance on A Book of Reasons, and beyond that, challenge yourself to find others like it-books that don't fit the mold, that are written with great intelligence and a passionate concern for the power of language.




3. The writer attempts to explain if his brother's life was worth living because he ended it so badly. He never answers some basic questions such as "Why did his brother only live with his grandmother" and "what made him so distant to his family". Why the writer chooses to go into such length about the history of the thermometer and the cosmos is beyond me. This book was chosen for my bookclub because of the previous comments and star rating. It should have been a hint to me how bad the book was when no library carried it, and I tried 2 major bookstores plus 3 department store and could only get this book by ordering it. Buy this book if you have trouble sleeping because out of 5 members of my club I was the only one who finished it and it took me forever!



4. The cover illustration of one of Joseph Cornell's cryptic boxes, assembled from discarded junk, is an excellent visual metaphor for the way in which John Vernon approaches the topic of death, loss and an exploration of the reasons for living in this book. Vernon attempts to make sense, not so much of the death, but of the peculiar, eclectic life of his older brother. The binding threads among the disparate elements of Vernon's university career, his role as executor of his brother's estate, the brother's gradual withdrawal from social relationships and the junkpile life that he leaves behind, are brief excerpts from an old encyclopedia that describe the tools and techniques of empirical culture. Vernon profoundly explores the microcosm of American family and lifestyle in his examination of the microcosm of his brother's life and their disconnected and blundered relationship. From the opening pages of his excursion to the local Walmart to find a thermometer to mount on his recently dead brother's house, Vernon is adept at using his own frustration and experiences of cultural clutter as the divining rod to unravel the peculiarities of brother's secluded and repulsively littered life. Vernon uses metaphors like the thermometer throughout the text to observe and measure his own as well as our cultural climate and the ways in which we collect and treat objects and relationships in our supposedly educated and modern American culture. Vernon employs a masterful mix of humor, angst, revulsion, annoyance and fascinated curiousity in his exploration of grieving as a means to examine the many-layered questions of life and death. It is a refreshing exploration that avoids the usual religious and spiritual overtones of the subject, yet retains a profound metaphysical inquiry about self, other and culture that presses the reader to frame (and reframe) his/her own perspective and practices. Vernon uses metaphor and object representation as tools to explore the essential questions and impacts of life and lifestyle. If there is one flaw in this fascinating and engaging book it is the ending, which slips into a conventional approach that pushes the reader to accept the notion that no life is a waste. When Vernon takes us into mundane territory in such an unconventional way it is a bit disappointing that he ends on such a conventional note.



5. John Vernon has the task of cleaning out his brother's house after his brother dies of a sudden illness. He discovers that his brother lived in an abyss of hopelessness and depression. This book is his attempt to come to terms with that discovery, and the questions of personal responsibility it raises for him. Should he have known how his brother was suffering? Could he have helped? Was he required to?

   In the beginning Vernon tries to approach these daunting questions in a light-hearted search for the reasons. Why the thermometer, for instance? His musings along these lines are quite interesting. He meanders through all sorts of unrelated arcane lore looking for connections, for the reasons why things happen the way they do. Ultimately, however, he has to acknowledge that all of these reasons are beside the point. He says, finally, "Reasons do have a limit. Shall I offer a history of the Pepsi bottle, the cigarette, the milk carton, the rag? A history of bad smells? Even now, in memory, I feel buried like Paul, trapped in his house, surrounded by the waste of unexplained things."

   This might have been a turning point in the narrative away from reasons to the limits of personal responsibility, but the author doesn't go there. He seems to withdraw into a kind of personal disgust that pushes away the responsibilities of love and kinship. He does not come to terms with his discovery, and this is the drama of the narrative. As this drama unfolds, however, I sense that it is no longer under Vernon's control. Vernon seems to drift to a place outside of human relationships, so that the book ends on a strange unresolved note.