Looking after or Skin

Looking After: A Son's Memoir

Author: John Daniel

Vagabond and spiritual seeker, wife and mother and former labor organizer, Zilla Daniel led a full and varied life. But in the fall of 1988, troubled with the onset of Alzheimer's, she comes to Portland, Oregon, to live with her son and his wife. Evolving slowly into the unfamiliar, she watches the dogwood outside their kitchen window, reads poetry, asks and re-asks the names of birds. Uneasy in his role as caregiver, and coping with his own depression, John Daniel struggles with guilt, embarrassment, and anger over his mother's transformation. As she loses her memory, Daniel delves into his own, uncovering both the root of his depression and the medicine for its cure in fragmented, long-dormant recollections of his childhood and youth. Mother and son journey through difficult and mysterious terrain, ultimately divining a path to each other. "Whatever she recognized, whatever she perceived, whatever she sensed, she faced the good world she had loved... The world flowed in through her window, flowed into her open eyes whatever they saw, even as she flowed forth to join the world from the personhood of her many days." Combining graceful prose with the tenacity of a lifelong seeker, John Daniel pays tribute to the life of a remarkable woman and depicts the burdens and unexpected blessings of caring for her. In the midst of daily tension and occasional despair, Daniel comprehends - then shares with us - Zilla's "deep smile of the spirit."

Publishers Weekly

In 1988, at the age of 80, Zilla, the author's independent, adventurous mother, became unable to continue living alone on the Maine seacoast and relocated to her son's home in Portland. Daniel, a poet (Common Ground), essayist (The Trail Home) and teacher, here relates the four difficult years he and his wife, Marilyn, spent caring for Zilla, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. In graceful, poignant prose, he describes how his mother, a former labor organizer and spiritual seeker who traveled to ashrams in India, declined into an increasingly helpless old woman. The author is at his best when recounting his sometimes fruitful attempts to communicate with Zilla and in describing the strain caretaking put on his marriage. His mother died in 1992. Daniel also recalls events from his childhood in an attempt to fight an ongoing depression. Although some of his memories are interesting, accounts of his LSD trips are repetitive, and his relentless introspection grows tiresome. (Oct.)

Library Journal

Ostensibly, this memoir focuses on the last four years in the long, adventurous life of the physically and mentally failing Zilla Daniel while in the care of the author, her son. John himself is struggling with a midlife depression that is constantly clouding his prospects, after years of drifting and substance abuse. Daniel (who has produced two books of poetry as well as an increasingly influential body of environmental journalism) leaves no doubt here that he can breathe new life into the familiar metaphors of received wisdom. Just as the possible meanings of the title broaden as the narrative progresses, the book itself covers more territory, above and beneath its trendy surface appeal (aging-parent problem, Alzheimer's, cascadia, hippiedom revisited, cats, and New Age psychodynamics). Underpinning the narrative is nothing less than a running essay on the nature of memory, culminating in the author's willingnessafter closely witnessing his mother's mental declineto abandon his previous notions of memory as a necessary determinant of human worth. Recommended for public and academic libraries.John Dye, Panhandle State Univ., Goodwell, Okla.

Kirkus Reviews

Frankly autotherapeutic and, after a writerly start, wildly in need of pruning—though capable of uncommon felicity in rendering the nuances of a mother's dementia.

Daniel, nature poet and essayist (The Trail Home, 1992), spirals through the streams of his self-consciousness in search of a sense of unity. He obsesses insistently, over his unhappy childhood, his protracted coming of age in the psychedelic counterculture, and his bittersweet challenge as caretaker of his fading, octogenarian mother, Zilla; and he is often too tortured to sustain the micro-mastery of capturing Zilla's surprise on looking down and seeing food on her plate midway through a meal, her stillness as "less like peace and more like vacancy," the cost to a marriage (the utter forfeiture of spontaneity) endemic to the territory of those attending an afflicted parent. Luckily, Zilla too was a seeker of unity—and a feisty one—who went from commune to ashram in her 70s, and the spiritual affinity between mother and son was among the reciprocities that bonded them during her four years in his Oregon home. Aware enough to take pleasure in Daniel's poetry readings, she was also still alert enough to suffer from a knowledge of her failing body. Like her creeping deafness, it became his burden also. "I knew she was blameless, and yet I blamed her"—universal enough, but then there's more—"because she was what I got for a child." Daniel juxtaposes his despair over Zilla with his stillborn hopes for progeny—one among many bitter second guesses—until he relaxes into an aptly delineated epiphany: now 45, "I've reached limits I'm unlikely to transcend."

In his relentless indulgence in self-examination, Daniel wears out his welcome long before the book's end, but his talent for fastidious apprehension cannot be dismissed.

Interesting book: Direction d'Opérations et Paquet de CD Étudiant

Skin: A Natural History

Author: Nina G Jablonski

We expose it, cover it, paint it, tattoo it, scar it, and pierce it. Our intimate connection with the world, skin protects us while advertising our health, our identity, and our individuality. This dazzling synthetic overview, written with a poetic touch and taking many intriguing side excursions, is a complete guidebook to the pliable covering that makes us who we are. Skin: A Natural History celebrates the evolution of three unique attributes of human skin: its naked sweatiness, its distinctive sepia rainbow of colors, and its remarkable range of decorations. Jablonski begins with a look at skin's structure and functions and then tours its three-hundred-million-year evolution, delving into such topics as the importance of touch and how the skin reflects and affects emotions. She examines the modern human obsession with age-related changes in skin, especially wrinkles. She then turns to skin as a canvas for self-expression, exploring our use of cosmetics, body paint, tattooing, and scarification. Skin: A Natural History places the rich cultural canvas of skin within its broader biological context for the first time, and the result is a tremendously engaging look at ourselves.

Publishers Weekly

This amply illustrated rhapsody to the body's largest and most visible organ showcases skin's versatility, importance in human biology and uniqueness: human skin is hairless and sweaty, has evolved in a spectrum of colors and is a billboard for self-expression. Penn State's anthropology chair, Jablonski nimbly interprets scientific data for a lay audience, and her geeky love for her discipline is often infectious. At her most compelling, Jablonski demonstrates that our hairlessness didn't evolve after humans adopted clothing or because our distant hominid relatives splashed through an aquatic phase like dolphins and whales; rather, it's inextricably linked to our abundance of sweat glands. Similarly intriguing are the notions that indigenous people of the hot tropics are tall and lean because mammals with a high ratio of skin surface area to body weight keep cool in intense heat, and that women have lighter skin color than men because females need to maximize vitamin D production during pregnancy and breastfeeding. Much less successful is a chapter entitled "Wear and Tear," which briefly discusses but sheds little light on such skin conditions as birthmarks, scabs, burns and acne, and serves up the same visual guide to checking moles for melanoma that is found in countless doctors' offices. Color and b&w illus. (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

The most elementary anatomy or biology presentation teaches that skin is the body's largest organ. Drawing on this fact, Jablonski (anthropology, Pennsylvania State Univ.; ed., The First Americans: The Pleistocene Colonization of the New World), who taught human anatomy for many years, provides a guidebook (her term) replete with topics "that have most engaged [her] in [her] work over the years." The result is a marvelous exploration of the organ we ignore until an abnormality prompts us to seek professional help. The chapters skillfully lead from one topic to the next and cover the history and physiology of skin, sweating, color, touch, tattoos and painting, and more. Jablonski's writing is clear; her enthusiasm for the topic, evident. Illustrations appropriately support discussions. Skin's mix of science, society/culture, and anthropology makes it easily read by and useful for all patrons. Highly recommended for all collections.-Michael D. Cramer, Schwarz BioSciences, RTP, NC Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.