Do You Remember Me?: A Father, a Daughter, and a Search for the Self
Author: Judith Levin
In her award-winning Harmful to Minors, Judith Levine radically disturbed our fixed ideas about childhood. Now, the poignantly personal Do You Remember Me? tackles the other end of life. The book is both the memoir of a daughter coming to terms with a difficult father who is sinking into dementia and an insightful exploration of the ways we think about disability, aging, and the self as it resides in the body and the world.
In prose that is unsentimental yet moving, serious yet darkly funny, complex in emotion and ideas yet spare in diction, Levine reassembles her father's personal and professional history even as he is losing track of it. She unpeels the layers of his complicated personality and uncovers information that surprises even her mother, to whom her father has been married for more than sixty years.
As her father deteriorates, the family consensus about who he was and is and how best to care for him constantly threatens to collapse. Levine recounts the painful discussions, mad outbursts, and gingerly negotiations, and dissects the shifting alliances among family, friends, and a changing guard of hired caretakers. Spending more and more time with her father, she confronts a relationship that has long felt bereft of love. By caring for his needs, she learns to care about and, slowly, to love him.
While Levine chronicles these developments, she looks outside her family for the sources of their perceptions and expectations, deftly weaving politics, science, history, and philosophy into their personal story. A memoir opens up to become a critique of our culture's attitudes toward the old and demented. A claustrophobic account of Alzheimer's is transformedinto a complex lesson about love, duty, and community.
What creates a self and keeps it whole? Levine insists that only the collaboration of others can safeguard her father's self against the riddling of his brain. Embracing interdependence and vulnerability, not autonomy and productivity, as the seminal elements of our humanity, Levine challenges herself and her readers to find new meaning, even hope, in one man's mortality and our own.
Publishers Weekly
Unsentimental and unsparing, this work studies in unnerving detail what happens when the mind begins to separate from the body and how our society has no model for coping with such fragmentation. Everything disintegrates for Levine's father, a psychologist and liberal political activist, after his Alzheimer's diagnosis. He can no longer comprehend books and magazines, and continues to flirt with women but cannot be intimate with his wife of 59 years. Levine, a natural storyteller and author of the controversial Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex, presents more than a tale about one man's disease and its impact on his family; she also examines how society separates itself from those who can no longer think clearly. She explicates the mind/body issues inherent in Alzheimer's from multiple perspectives, invoking a host of psychologists and scientists. She makes herself examine her relationship with her father (which has always been fraught) and her mother (whom she resents for leaving her ill father for another man). Statistics explicate Alzheimer's prevalence (10% of those over 65 have it; 50% of those over 85), but Levine delves beyond the numbers, examining the socio-political psychology of Alzheimer's treatment and what happens to those who fall prey to it. As her father worsens, Levine gets closer to him. This is a daughter's poignant homage to a father she came to know best after he lost his mind, but it's also a searing indictment of how America treats its disabled and a cautionary tale for aging baby boomers. Agent, Joy Harris. (May 11) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
This sensitive, insightful memoir of a daughter coping with her father's Alzheimer's is reminiscent of Carol Wolfe Konek's Daddyboy. Unlike Sue Miller (The Story of My Father) and Eleanor Cooney (Death in Slow Motion), Levine (Harmful to Minors) is not her parent's primary caregiver, yet her account, like theirs, depicts the toll a loved one's dementia takes on family and friends. Over a period of 12 years, Levine helped her mother care for her father. The experience caused her to reflect on the meaning of self in a culture that emphasizes cognition and rationality at the expense of emotions and relationships. As her father deteriorated, first mentally and later physically, the stress of caregiving led to the collapse of her mother's health and her parents' separation after 50 years of marriage. Levine became her father's advocate and attempted to establish a new relationship with the man who abused her physically and emotionally as a child and an adolescent. Though she provides dates, Levine's nonlinear narrative style (using flashbacks to illuminate the present) may be distracting to readers initially, which unfortunately diminishes the power of her message. Recommended for large public libraries. Lucille M. Boone, San Jose P.L., CA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A tenaciously engaged memoir from Levine (Harmful to Minors, 2002, etc.) about her relationship with her parents as her father drifts deeper and deeper into Alzheimer's. It starts with Lillian and Stan Levine's 50th wedding anniversary party, as Stan rambles on and on and on. "For those who do not know what is happening to him, the party is Dad's coming out as a dement," writes his daughter. For his family-feisty, contentious, left-wing, New York Jewish intellectuals among whom the brain reigns supreme-it is the cruel reality. But in the bigger picture, reactions to Stan's ailment reflect our hyper-cognitive society, she argues: "We consider dementia not just a disease, but a living death." Delving into the literature of Alzheimer's for answers and writing with a sure hand on unstable ground, Levine explores the disease's social effects. "More than social normality comes with language; personhood does," and as the first goes, so, our society deems, does the latter. Once, "the aged lived among us all, ill or hale, helpful or inconvenient, respected or humiliated in differing measure." That is often no longer the case; we have systematically "stripped elderly people of the roles that had sustained meaning in their lives through mandatory retirement, social isolation, and the disintegration of traditional family ties." After her mother starts to crumble under the responsibility, starting a new relationship as the old one slips away, Levine must confront the idea of putting her father into a nursing home. Her narrative is emotional as well as intellectual: she grapples with her feelings for her father, who was an overbearing, provocative (and occasionally violent) lord of misrule; sheconsiders and rejects taking him under her own care; she jousts with her mother over her seeming abandonment of her husband. It is a maddening, very human dance, and Levine gets it down just right. Roiling, confrontational family portrait.
Table of Contents:
| Prelude | 1 | |
| 1. | Anger | 11 |
| 2. | Mind | 29 |
| 3. | Acquaintance | 51 |
| 4. | Quarantine | 71 |
| 5. | Care | 103 |
| 6. | Body | 131 |
| 7. | Dis/loyalty | 153 |
| 8. | Decompensation | 173 |
| 9. | Decisions | 211 |
| 10. | Family | 249 |
| 11. | Himself | 281 |
| Reading List | 302 | |
| Acknowledgments | 309 |
Interesting textbook: Turbulence in World Politics or Surpassing Realism
Longevity Bible: 8 Essential Strategies for Keeping Your Mind Sharp & Your Body Young
Author: Gary Small
From the author of The Memory Bible and The Memory Prescription, Dr. Gary Small's exciting, all-encompassing formula for living a longer and better life
Bestselling author and expert on aging Dr. Gary Small show us how to live longer, stronger, better lives in his new book, The Longevity Bible, by following simple guidelines such as a positive attitude, gratifying relationships, and lifelong education.
Comprised of advice on memory fitness, healthy diet, physical conditioning, and stress reduction, The Longevity Bible follows the stories of four typical readers in different stages of their lives, and how those lives are improved with his plans.
Publishers Weekly
Small (The Memory Bible; The Memory Prescription), chief of the UCLA Memory and Aging Research Center, offers eight essentials (positive outlook, mental and physical exercise, acceptance of change, are three) in this manual for a better, longer life. He takes a holistic approach to body and brain fitness, covering everything from meditation to diet and skillful makeup application. While his "essentials" likely won't be anything new to reasonably self-aware readers, the author does provide thought-provoking questionnaires, helpful step-by-step approaches to achieving various goals and detailed anecdotes about patients who have benefited from UCLA's programs. Information gleaned from UCLA's research lends credibility, and a section called Putting It All Together makes self-improvement efforts manageable, not overwhelming. The chapters that focus on memory are the most detailed; they include helpful tricks and challenging games that will surely inspire an increase in sales of crossword-puzzle books. Perhaps in recognition of the book's ambitiousness, a nine-page list of additional resources will prove handy for those who wish to further investigate some of the topics touched upon in the book. (June) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Aging baby boomers are inundated with all sorts of resources advising them on how to live longer, happier, and healthier lives. This latest self-help book by neuroscientist Small (chief, UCLA Memory & Aging Research Ctr.; The Memory Bible) tackles both mind and body well-being in later life. His eight strategies for quality longevity include the usual suspects, e.g., keeping mentally and physically fit, maintaining healthy social and sexual relationships, keeping a positive attitude, avoiding stress, and following a low-fat diet rich in protein and antioxidants. Information is presented in concise, readable portions and is backed by summaries of relevant scientific research. While most of the material is available elsewhere (e.g., Gary Null's Ultimate Anti-Aging Program; Andrew Weil's Healthy Aging: A Lifelong Guide to Your Physical and Spiritual Well-Being), Small's upbeat attitude; readable text; and abundance of lists, questionnaires, quizzes, puzzles, case studies, and recipes are informative and fun and encourage readers to apply his recommendations to their own lives. The bibliography references scientific literature only. A good choice for all consumer health and aging collections.-Karen McNally Bensing, Benjamin Rose Lib., Cleveland Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
