The House on Beartown Road: A Memoir of Learning and Forgetting
Author: Elizabeth Cohen
In this beautiful book, Elizabeth Cohen gives us a true and moving portrait of the love and courage of a family.
Elizabeth, a member of the "sandwich generation"—people caught in the middle, simultaneously caring for their children and for their aging parents—is the mother of Ava and the daughter of Daddy, and responsible for both. Hers is the story of a woman's struggle to keep her family whole, to raise her child in a house of laughter and love, and to keep her father from hiding the house keys in his slippers.
In this story full of everyday triumphs, first steps, and elderly confusion, Ava, a baby, finds each new picture, each new word, each new song, something to learn greedily, joyfully. Daddy is a man in his twilight years for whom time moves slowly and lessons are not learned but quietly, frustratingly forgotten. Elizabeth, a suddenly single mother with a career and a mortgage and a hamper of laundry, finds her world spiraling out of control yet full of beauty. Faced with mounting disasters, she chooses to confront life head-on.
Written in wonderful prose and imbued with an unquenchable spirit, The House on Beartown Road takes us on a journey through the remarkable landscape that is family.
The New York Times
Instead of molding all this into 270 pages of scathing retribution or bitter self-pity, Cohen has written a frank, funny and unexploitative memoir. She is not shy about detailing her father's Alzheimer's, but she's equally intent on illuminating his dignity. Indeed, the disease's cruel habit of eating away at memory made her determined to understand better the man who now depends on her for his existence. And though she doesn't glamorize Alzheimer's, she's not blind to its occasional heartbreaking beauty. — Maggie Jones
The Washington Post
Cohen's perspective on this painful experience is clearsighted, and her choices were guided by love. Her memoir is a potent articulation of the ties between one generation and the next. — Jane Ciabattari
Publishers Weekly
In this moving yet unsentimental memoir, Cohen chronicles the year her aging father, Sanford, suffering from mid-to-late-stage Alzheimer's, came to live with her and her baby, Ava, in a New York State farmhouse. The three endure a cold winter, Ava's teething and the ravages of Alzheimer's. Sanford, a retired economics professor, retains his physical health while his mind deteriorates, a process Cohen-a Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin reporter-describes in detail and with compassion, even as he loses the ability to know her ("I am having something of a blackout. Perhaps you can remind me who you are?"). Ava learns to walk and talk while Sanford forgets how to climb stairs and struggles with his vocabulary (when he can't remember the word "water," he substitutes "the liquid substance from the spigot"). "Daddy walks around now this way, dropping pieces of language behind him, the baby following, picking them up." Naturally, life's difficult. Sanford misses his wife, who lives with Cohen's sister on the other side of the country; Cohen's husband abandons them early on and she struggles to find help from local social services. Even though "each day arches numerous times toward disaster," the trio survives, even thrives. Cohen takes pleasure in her daughter, outings in parks, friends' and neighbors' generosity and the "memory project"-her attempt to catalogue her father's stories from his childhood, war years in the Pacific and teaching career. With splashes of humor and occasional-and understandable-self-pity, Cohen's fluid prose lifts her forceful story to a higher level, making it a tribute to her father and her family. (Apr.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Cohen suddenly finds herself part of the "sandwich generation"-adults caring for their aging parents while simultaneously rearing their own children. Her situation is even more complicated: as an older mother, her own child is only nine months old at the time her father, diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, comes to live with her family and shortly after that her husband leaves. Cohen is a journalist in the nearby town, but the old farmhouse way out in the country, on Beartown Road, suddenly becomes more of a liability than a luxury. The author crafts a workable albeit chaotic environment out of the growing vocabulary and motor skills of her daughter, Ava, and the faltering neurological network and failing memory that is replacing the economics professor she calls Dad. What should be a terribly sad story becomes a testament to the power of familial love and responsibility. The many tragedies of Alzheimer's are offset by Cohen's indomitable spirit and a few triumphs along the way, all related in her eloquent prose. Bernadette Dunne is masterful at moving among Elizabeth, Ava, and Sanford Cohen; her reading elevates this memoir to a superlative listening experience. Highly recommended for all public libraries.-Gloria Maxwell, Penn Valley Community Coll., Kansas City, MO Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Lyrical, gripping tale of the year Cohen's life went to hell. One minute she was living an idyll, lazing through her days as a rural-upstate New York reporter and nights in a secluded farmhouse with a loving husband and infant daughter; the next, her Alzheimer's-afflicted father had moved in, her husband had moved across the country to shack up with an 18-year-old, and winter buried the house in snow. Cohen and her youthful husband had been a Manhattan couple with an active social life. After the move to Beartown Road and Dad's appearance, her city sophistication was entirely irrelevant in the endless battle to keep her father and daughter fed, dry, and safe, to get through the winter without freezing to death (apparently a surprisingly easy thing to do in a civilized North American town), neglecting her family, or losing her job. Cohen takes what could be a self-indulgent sob story and turns it into the stuff of high adventure. When she lies to her father about the eldercare group he attends, telling him he is the group's teacher, the reader prays the fiction will hold so that she can go to work secure in the knowledge that he won't accidentally burn the house down while smoking unattended. When neighbors plow her driveway after big snowfalls, we're swept with gratitude for the author's sake. Cohen frames the whole of her messy, absorbing year in the framework of how we learn and forget. As her daughter gains words, her father loses them. As her daughter acquires motor skills, her father stumbles. As she describes the waxing of her daughter's personality and the waning of her father's, the fact he cannot remember her name or learn her daughter's, Cohen manages never to resort tosentimentality. The adventure and peril of everyday living captured in language that's light, beautiful, and razor-sharp. Agent: David Black
New interesting book: Menopause the Natural Way or Strength Training Deck
Advanced First Aid Afloat
Author: Peter F Eastman
Over the years since its first publication in 1972, more than 25,000 bluewater sailors have looked to this book when injury or illness struck at sea. Virtually every accident or ailment that might happen when professional medical care is unavailable is squarely faced and dealt with, using layman's language and step-by-step instructions that allay panic and calmly take the reader from diagnosis, through treatment, to followup care. The book has been revised for this fourth edition to include the latest methods of treatment and the most appropriate modern drugs and dosages.
Diagrams inside the front and back covers quickly point the reader to the section of the book that should be consulted. Each section starts with a short account of a possible accident or sickness that might occur on a voyage, and then lists the primary steps to be taken by the caregiver. Photographs and diagrams accompany many of the descriptions of procedures. If further treatment is required when the ship reaches the shore, this is also listed.
There are separate chapters devoted to preparing a crew and the boat's medical chest for long cruises, including lists of drugs for which you will need a prescription. A number of chapters deal with children, whose needs are often unique.
Booknews
First published in 1972, this indispensable handbook addresses virtually every accident or ailment that might occur when professional medical help is unavailable at sea, with clear instructions in layman's language on the best course of action to take. This new edition includes updated methods of treatment and the most appropriate drugs and dosages. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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