PortadaGruposCharlasMásPanorama actual
Buscar en el sitio
Este sitio utiliza cookies para ofrecer nuestros servicios, mejorar el rendimiento, análisis y (si no estás registrado) publicidad. Al usar LibraryThing reconoces que has leído y comprendido nuestros términos de servicio y política de privacidad. El uso del sitio y de los servicios está sujeto a estas políticas y términos.

Resultados de Google Books

Pulse en una miniatura para ir a Google Books.

Cargando...

The Theft of Memory: Losing My Father, One Day at a Time

por Jonathan Kozol

MiembrosReseñasPopularidadValoración promediaMenciones
14342189,831 (3.73)34
Biography & Autobiography. Medical. Nonfiction. HTML:

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.

.
… (más)
Ninguno
Cargando...

Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará.

Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro.

» Ver también 34 menciones

Mostrando 1-5 de 44 (siguiente | mostrar todos)
Esta reseña ha sido escrita por los Primeros Reseñadores de LibraryThing.
This is a beautiful book. It’s an ode to a beloved person who is living inside a stranger. The author and son, Jonathan Kozol, visits his father, Dr. Harry Kozol, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, in a care facility. The son carefully records his interactions with his dad— noting both the deterioration in his father’s thinking process, and also the sudden bright spots of memory that deeply endear him to his dad. In addition, Jonathan brings his dog, Persnickity, to visit his father who becomes quite fond of this canine.

Jonathan notes which personnel who care for his dad most appreciate his father by how they actively interact with him. The son expresses disdain for people who talk “over” others with cognitive defects, treating those affected as if they are not an active part of a surrounding conversation. Later, Jonathan moves his father out of the care facility back into the home in which he lived with his wife prior to his mental deterioration.

I liked that the author talked about issues that were related to his parents, but not specifically about them — the idea that some individuals believe older people lose their worth to society and are seen as more expendable and also the idea that some medical practitioners are not as “on the ball” as we expect them to be. This latter issue left me particularly uneasy.

What I liked most about this book was the author’s love and devotion to both parents. It came across clearly, page after page, until the end. What a beautiful tribute to both of the author’s parents this memoir is.

I found the epilogue to be especially stirring. In it, the author’s father reversed a previous demand that Jonathan give up his employment fighting for social justice and instead go into a more academic-oriented career. He relented to his son with the words to encourage Jonathan to follow his own heart, saying “You’re going to be fine.”

I would love to read other books by this author. He has such a sensitivity for others, and I like how he expresses this in words. This is a book written with love and respect, and for that I found it warm and endearing. It did a job on my heartstrings. Read it if you have/had parents whom you love/loved despite any difficulties they suffer/suffered. ( )
  SqueakyChu | Dec 29, 2021 |
Esta reseña ha sido escrita por los Primeros Reseñadores de LibraryThing.
I wanted to read this book for a couple reasons -- one because I loved so many of the books wherein Kozol has chronicled the ills of society and issues of social justice. As an educator, I particularly valued Kozol's books about education. Secondly, I too have faced what Kozol faced, experiencing the "theft of memory" losing my mother one day at a time. The brilliance and aptness of the title grabbed me, as did the narrative of Kozol's deeply personal book. His father was not just anyone suffering from Alzheimers but a leading specialist in the area of brain research. Thus Dr. Kozol had a grasp of what was happening to him. While I appreciated that unique perspective, what struck even more story of the father son relationship. Although a very different book for Kozol, it did not disappoint. ( )
  pataustin | Mar 16, 2021 |
I have long admired Jonathan Kozol as a writer, an advocate, and a person. His latest book explores the complex issues of caring for aging parents with his characteristic clarity and grace. Both his parents lived past the age of 100 and he did his utmost to keep them healthy, at home, and content. The book primarily focuses on his relationship with his father, an esteemed psychiatrist and neurologist. Among his father's papers, the son discovers connections with Eugene O'Neill and other famous and infamous patients. But to me, those revelations were of more interest to biographers and historians. Most of us will be more fascinated with how his father can precisely identify what he is experiencing as Alzheimer's begins to interfere with his thoughts and memory. And many of us will find deep meaning in Jonathan's efforts to maintain his parents' integrity and personality as long as possible. ( )
  AnaraGuard | Nov 1, 2020 |
This was the first book I won through a Goodreads giveaway! Although I thought there was a lot of emotion behind this book, which I admired so much, the end result was a little disjointed and disorganized. I loved all of the material concerning his father and his mother as they were struggling through their old age, as well as all of the anecdotes about their various caretakers. However, there were some parts about Dr. Kozol that Jonathan wrote that seemed an awful lot like "here's some stuff that my father did that I found in his files." These sections weren't compelling, perhaps because of the second hand way it was told. Although I'm sure Dr. Kozol's relationships with Eugene O'Neill, Patty Hearst, and the Boston strangler were interesting, the manner in which they were presented here was lacking in urgency and personality. ( )
  Katie_Roscher | Jan 18, 2019 |

I listened to this book as an audiobook, read wonderfully by Sean Runnette. This is the story of the author's relationship with his father (with both his parents, really), in his father's final years, as his decline from Alzheimer's takes its inevitable toll.

Jonathan Kozol is an educator and established writer in his own right, often writing about the state of education in the United States. His father, Dr. Harry Kozol was a neuropsychiatrist, highly respected and accomplished in his field. His clients included some rather high-profile names, as well, but, as his son Jonathan recounts, in going through his father's papers, notes and files, the elder Kozol was a highly ethical man in his dealings with all his patients and always treated everyone with the same care and respect. I did wonder about some of the details revealed about some of those high profile patients, but I am going to assume that Kozol, being a seasoned writer himself, did due diligence when it came to permissions and patient confidentiality, I enjoyed the trips down memory lane for Jonathan, as he revealed his father's (and to a lesser degree, his mother's) early lives. Both parents lived long, full lives (both dying at 100+ years). This memoir chronicles with great love, lives well-lived and the tragedy of this insidious disease. He also chronicles the tremendous amount of care (and expense) required to allow a life of dignity to proceed to its natural end. He was fortunate that he had the resources, financial and otherwise, to allow this to happen for his parents, as I suspect that many - maybe most - people would not have such means available to them. The quality of care, too, for the very elderly, and infirm, is another source of very real concern, as Kozol experienced first hand from his father's primary physicians. I wish this was an area of medicine that was making better progress, as we age, ourselves. Overall, I enjoyed this book. The reader's voice was excellent, soft-spoken, and loving. ( )
  jessibud2 | Feb 5, 2017 |
Mostrando 1-5 de 44 (siguiente | mostrar todos)
sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
Debes iniciar sesión para editar los datos de Conocimiento Común.
Para más ayuda, consulta la página de ayuda de Conocimiento Común.
Título canónico
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés. Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
Título original
Títulos alternativos
Fecha de publicación original
Personas/Personajes
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés. Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
Lugares importantes
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés. Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
Acontecimientos importantes
Películas relacionadas
Epígrafe
Dedicatoria
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés. Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
For Matthew

with deepest gratitude
Primeras palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés. Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
My father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1994 when he was eighty-eight years old.
Citas
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés. Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
I know the time has long passed when doctors, no matter what their specialty might be, would interrupt their private lives so willingly, in order to fulfill their sense of obligation to a patient. Maybe it's beyond all reason to regret the passing of that era. Still, I wished the doctor at the nursing home had retained a little more of that tradition of attentiveness. I would come to have the same wish later on about another geriatrician my father would rely upon. I never felt they gave him back in full, or even in small part, what he had given once unstintingly to people who had placed their trust in him.
My grandmother seemed to me a woman of the Bible.  She lit candles in front of me and said her prayers and gave me blessings and good dinners. Even when I was twenty-one years old, she’d still put candy Kisses in my pocket when I was about to leave.
I told him it reminded me of when he used to take me fishing with him on a lake in Maine when I was a child, maybe eight or ten years old.
Those who work as home attendants and companions to the elderly are given little of the respect and, of course, a great deal less of the remuneration that are given to physicians and others in the higher reaches of the healthcare industry. But in many situations they are the only ones who truly know the patients and the ones who advocate with greatest diligence on their behalf.
You’re still living as if you regard yourself as some kind of mild-mannered, Harvard educated reembodiment of Che Guevara. (Dr. Harry Kozol)
Últimas palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés. Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
(Haz clic para mostrar. Atención: puede contener spoilers.)
Aviso de desambiguación
Editores de la editorial
Blurbistas
Idioma original
DDC/MDS Canónico
LCC canónico

Referencias a esta obra en fuentes externas.

Wikipedia en inglés

Ninguno

Biography & Autobiography. Medical. Nonfiction. HTML:

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.

.

No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca.

Descripción del libro
Resumen Haiku

Antiguo miembro de Primeros reseñadores de LibraryThing

El libro The Theft of Memory de Jonathan Kozol estaba disponible desde LibraryThing Early Reviewers.

Debates activos

Ninguno

Cubiertas populares

Enlaces rápidos

Valoración

Promedio: (3.73)
0.5
1
1.5
2 3
2.5 1
3 10
3.5 9
4 19
4.5 4
5 6

¿Eres tú?

Conviértete en un Autor de LibraryThing.

 

Acerca de | Contactar | LibraryThing.com | Privacidad/Condiciones | Ayuda/Preguntas frecuentes | Blog | Tienda | APIs | TinyCat | Bibliotecas heredadas | Primeros reseñadores | Conocimiento común | 203,242,040 libros! | Barra superior: Siempre visible