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Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating and honest memoir
Review: I bought this book after hearing the NPR interview with the author, because a close friend was coping with a similar situation (mother slipping into dementia, angry outbursts, fighting to get out of nursing home). This book is a fascinating portrait of the author's parents, their good points and bad. Very readable. I didn't want to put it down.
Rating: 
Summary: beautiful and sad
Review: I listened to Linda Grant on National Public Radio, Fresh Air program yesterday. Very interesting and moving. I can relate to it as my father went thru a similar decline over a 3 year period. He suffered from TIA "mini-strokes" that slowly diminish selected brain capabilities, many times without the victim's or family's knowledge. Linda relates a similar experience. It's frustrating in not ever really knowing what is going on inside his ticker when you speak. It's frustrating to know that each person loses different capabilities at different times. It drags you down, with everything seeming so one-sided. It's frustrating that modern medicine is essentially powerless to stop this degeneration, with no effective tools or strategy. Linda is much more articulate than I could be in describing the same experience I went through. If it does nothing more, it gives those of us a comparative basis by which to judge our own decisions in similar circumstances. For those who have been thru this, it gives us someone to relate to. For those who have not, it prepares you. As a boomer, I've finally graduated to what I call 'adulthood': where we are sandwiched between two generations who both depend upon us. Calling the experience overwhelming only begins to describe it. Worth the read.
Rating:
Summary: Worth the Read
Review: I listened to Linda Grant on National Public Radio, Fresh Air program yesterday. Very interesting and moving. I can relate to it as my father went thru a similar decline over a 3 year period. He suffered from TIA "mini-strokes" that slowly diminish selected brain capabilities, many times without the victim's or family's knowledge. Linda relates a similar experience. It's frustrating in not ever really knowing what is going on inside his ticker when you speak. It's frustrating to know that each person loses different capabilities at different times. It drags you down, with everything seeming so one-sided. It's frustrating that modern medicine is essentially powerless to stop this degeneration, with no effective tools or strategy. Linda is much more articulate than I could be in describing the same experience I went through. If it does nothing more, it gives those of us a comparative basis by which to judge our own decisions in similar circumstances. For those who have been thru this, it gives us someone to relate to. For those who have not, it prepares you. As a boomer, I've finally graduated to what I call 'adulthood': where we are sandwiched between two generations who both depend upon us. Calling the experience overwhelming only begins to describe it. Worth the read.
Rating:
Summary: beautiful and sad
Review: If you've ever had a relative or loved one slip away into dementia, this book will strike home. And if you've had a friend going through this experience, this book will help you to understand what they are going through. This book, like the experience of living with dementia, is at times funny, at times tearful. It's an honest picture of what it's like to be with someone who is rapidly losing who they were.
Rating:
Summary: WHAT ABOUT HER NEW BOOK?
Review: Linda Grant has just won the British Orange Prize 2000 for her new book "When I Lived in Modern Times". As with her first well-received novel "The Cast Iron Shore" (out of print), this is a skilful combination of the personal and the political. In the Orange winner book, we follow the fortunes of Evelyn Sert who leaves postwar UK after her mother's death for a new life in Palestine. Evelyn never knew her father and grew up in what she describes as a 'shadow family', her mother the mistress of a married Jewish businessman. Arriving in British-ruled Palestine, Evelyn is like a blank canvas, in search of an identity for herself. An admirer of all things modern and with no interest in the past, she finds herself in a country with its face turned firmly towards the future. Evelyn settles in the modern city of Tel Aviv and soon becomes involved with the struggle for Jewish independence. Assuming the identity of hairdresser enables her to pass information about the policemen husbands of her British clients to her lover in the Jewish underground movement. Tel Aviv is home to the Jewish refugees of the world and Evelyn soon discovers that it is one thing to survive, but another to survive intact. Grant produces strong visual imagery and dynamic characters with memorable voices that resonate throughout this enticing and satisfying novel. A deserved prize, then.
Rating:
Summary: WHAT ABOUT HER NEW BOOK?
Review: Linda Grant has just won the British Orange Prize 2000 for her new book "When I Lived in Modern Times". As with her first well-received novel "The Cast Iron Shore" (out of print), this is a skilful combination of the personal and the political. In the Orange winner book, we follow the fortunes of Evelyn Sert who leaves postwar UK after her mother's death for a new life in Palestine. Evelyn never knew her father and grew up in what she describes as a 'shadow family', her mother the mistress of a married Jewish businessman. Arriving in British-ruled Palestine, Evelyn is like a blank canvas, in search of an identity for herself. An admirer of all things modern and with no interest in the past, she finds herself in a country with its face turned firmly towards the future. Evelyn settles in the modern city of Tel Aviv and soon becomes involved with the struggle for Jewish independence. Assuming the identity of hairdresser enables her to pass information about the policemen husbands of her British clients to her lover in the Jewish underground movement. Tel Aviv is home to the Jewish refugees of the world and Evelyn soon discovers that it is one thing to survive, but another to survive intact. Grant produces strong visual imagery and dynamic characters with memorable voices that resonate throughout this enticing and satisfying novel. A deserved prize, then.
Rating:
Summary: A memoir of individual memory and family history
Review: Linda Grant, a feature writer for the Guardian [UK], has written a memoir about memory, focusing both on the loss of her family's history as the older generations die off and the deterioration of her mother's mind due to Multi-Infarct Dementia [MID], which stifles short-term memory and gradually scrambles older recollections. The book is also a intensely personal struggle against the guilt and helplessness one feels when making the necessary decision to commit a loved one to an institution.
Grant is descended from Jewish immigrants who arrived from Russian and Poland and settled in Britain and America before the Second World War. (Many of her family's relatives who remained behind were, of course, killed by the Nazis.) A somewhat rebellious daughter during the heady and reckless Sixties, she soon realizes that all those stories that used to bore her as a child will soon be lost forever: "My mother, the last of her generation, was losing her memory," she mourns. "In a hundred years there will no one left alive who remembers her, who can tell you who she was.... Without the past we're nothing, we belong to nobody." All that remain are a few scattered photographs and letters lacking any basic context and the occasional recollection that her mother summons up out of the blue and whose authenticity Grant can no longer verify.
The second aspect of the book is the most moving--and the most laudable. Grant recounts the frustrations and the episodes that led her and her sister to intercede and commit their mother to a care center, and she describes the legal and bureaucratic obstacles that nearly prevented them from making this step. What makes this decision particularly difficult--and, to some strangers, hardhearted--is that her mother is capable of periods of perfect lucidity and social grace. Grant describes how, while her mother's domestic conditions and intellectual capacity deteriorated to the point where she became a danger to herself, she retained an acute awareness of how she appeared to others as well as "the basest, most acquisitive part of ourselves"--the urge to go shopping: "So we shop together, outside time, mother and daughter united each in our own purposeful quest to do what we have always done, and which to her goes on making sense."
What keeps this book from surrendering to guilt and self-pity is Grant's admirable sense of humor--some of her sketches are heart-achingly funny--as well as the research that lends its framework an aura of objectivity. "Remind Me Who I Am, Again" certainly provides comfort and advice to relatives of those with aging family members, but it is also a valuable read to anyone who cares about individual memory and family history.
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