When Bob and Linda Waxler received a phone call warning them their beloved and accomplished son Jonathan was taking heroin, they began a journey that took them through the detox hospitals and halfway houses of America. But the second call a year later, from the medical examiner in San Francisco, informing them that Jonathan had died, plunged them into the deep darkness--a long, lonely journey into the center of themselves. Their task was to survive in a world that would never again be the same, and they did survive and even triumph, incorporating Jonathan into their lives not as a lost son, but as a living spirit who is with them in a new way.
Written with unexpected humor and great warmth, The Widower's Notebook is a portrait of a marriage, an account of the complexities of finding oneself single again after losing your spouse, and a story of the enduring power of familial love. "This is deeply moving ... beautifully written and modulated, with a dollop of droll, black humor. It is such an achievement, like running uphill against a strong wind."--Joyce Carol Oates On a summer day in New York Jonathan Santlofer discovers his wife, Joy, gasping for breath on their living room couch. After a frenzied 911 call, an ambulance race across Manhattan, and hours pacing in a hospital waiting room, a doctor finally delivers the fateful news. Consumed by grief, Jonathan desperately tries to pursue life as he always had--writing, social engagements, and working on his art--but finds it nearly impossible to admit his deep feelings of loss to anyone, not even his to beloved daughter, Doria, or to himself. As Jonathan grieves and heals, he tries to unravel what happened to Joy, a journey that will take him nearly two years.
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.
A prizewinning political scientist traces the origins of urban-rural political conflict and shows how geography shapes elections in America and beyond Why is it so much easier for the Democratic Party to win the national popular vote than to build and maintain a majority in Congress? Why can Democrats sweep statewide offices in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan yet fail to take control of the same states' legislatures? Many place exclusive blame on partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression. But as political scientist Jonathan A. Rodden demonstrates in Why Cities Lose, the left's electoral challenges have deeper roots in economic and political geography. In the late nineteenth century, support for the left began to cluster in cities among the industrial working class. Today, left-wing parties have become coalitions of diverse urban interest groups, from racial minorities to the creative class. These parties win big in urban districts but struggle to capture the suburban and rural seats necessary for legislative majorities. A bold new interpretation of today's urban-rural political conflict, Why Cities Lose also points to electoral reforms that could address the left's under-representation while reducing urban-rural polarization.
For every parent who has loved with every fiber of their being lost, and never imagined they could survive. For anyone yearning to know How could God possibly bring good out of this? Laurie E White tells the story of her son in Jonathans Miracle. Jonathan arrived bringing hope and joy to a family in turmoil. Over the next ten years he wove his way into the hearts of each member of that family and all who knew him. Then, one morning Laurie and her husband received a frantic phone call at work: Jonathan was choking. For the next seventeen days he lay unconscious in the hospital, while family, friends and strangers prayed for a miracle. Jonathans Miracle invites you to travel the journey with her. Along the way she shares her personal journal writings, and original poems, borne from a mothers heart, as she copes with tragedy, trust, acceptance, and beginning to live again. What is it like to lose a child? It is like finding out the sun isn't going to rise tomorrow; That the whole earth has been turned off its axis. It is like waking up to find every pine tree a shade of purple Every daisy, black You will hope, you will cry, you will see Gods faithfulness. And you will experience Jonathans Miracle.
Seasons come and go, but Wynter seemed to leave too soon. When Jonathan Pitts took his wife of 15 years into his arms for their anniversary dance, he had no idea that within a month he would be on a completely different journey, navigating life after Wynter's sudden death at the age of 38. One moment he was married to a successful author and magazine publisher, and putting the finishing touches on their book about marriage. The next he was a widower and a single father of four grieving daughters. Without warning, the future his family had planned together dissolved, leaving Jonathan trying to answer the question that echoed through his daughters’ hearts and his own: How could a loving God allow this unspeakable loss? My Wynter Season is Jonathan’s story of losing the most wonderful gift he had ever been given and his journey toward understanding life without her. Yet in the wilderness of his grief, Jonathan found himself surrounded by God’s extravagant love, and came to truly understand Christ’s life-giving promise that death is not the end.
Jonathan's Legacy returns to the roots of the Jonathan Trilogy: the love for those weakest amongst us, children, particularly the undesired ones, street kids who find new homes and love, just as Jonathan and Dan once had, in their youth. We follow the Jackson family, founded by Jonathan and Dan, as they grapple with the loss of their family patriarch. Parker and Cody set out to start a patchwork family of their own, while Marc comes to terms with his loss. And who is Kim Hwan? This is the third and final book in this accidental trilogy, a book written out of the desperate search for answers, to bring hope where there was only despair, and to find much-needed closure. Anything but a happily ever after is unimaginable. In this trilogy: Jonathan's Hope (Book 1) Jonathan's Promise (Book 2) Jonathan's Legacy (Book 3)
What is like to live without touch or movement/position sense (proprioception)? The only way to understand the importance of these senses, so familiar we cannot imagine their absence, is to ask someone in that position. Ian Waterman lost them below the neck over forty years ago, though pain and temperature perception and his peripheral movement nerves were unaffected. Without proprioceptive feedback and touch the movement brain was disabled. Completely unable to move, he felt disembodied and frightened. Then, slowly, he taught himself to dress, eat and walk by thinking about each movement and with visual supervision. In Losing Touch, the narrative moves between biography and scientific research, theatre, documentary and zero gravity. He has been married three times, and built up successful careers in disability access audit, using his impairment to his advantage, and in rare turkey breeding and journalism. The neuroscience has led to data on movement without feedback, the pleasantness of touch, gesture, pain and body orientation in space. The account shows how the science was actually done but also reveals Ian's journey from passive subject to informed critic of science and scientists and that the science has given him both more understanding but also greater confidence personally. His unique response to such a rare condition has also led to a BBC documentary, theatrical portrayals and a weightless flight with NASA. As a young man he sought triumph over his impairment; now, nearly 65, he has more mature reflections on living with such an extraordinary loss, the limits it has imposed and the opportunities it has enabled. He gives his views on scientists and on others he has met including Oliver Sacks and Peter Brook. In an Afterword those from science, the arts and philosophy give an appreciation of his contribution. The book is the result of nearly 30 years close collaboration between author and subject.
A riveting true account of identical twin brothers battling twin addictionsone who died an untimely death from AIDS, the other a rising medical doctor who describes his descent into darkness over his overwhelming grief, and how his brother helped him learn how to live from beyond.
