Kozol Harry L. - The theft of memory : losing my father, one day at a time
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House author Jonathan Kozols deeply personal biography of his father, a brilliant neurologist who suffered from Alzheimers.There are few writers of conscience who write as beautifully as Jonathan Kozol.Departing from the South Bronx and turning his sensitive eye to his own life and legacy, The Theft of Memory is Kozols most personal book to date, as it explores the life of his father, Harry. Dr. Harry L. Kozol was a nationally-renowned neurologist whose work helped establish the emerging fields of forensic psychiatry and neuropsychiatry. He was a remarkable clinician with unusual capacity to diagnose and identify neurological and psychotic illnesses in highly complicated and sophisticated people, including well-known artists, writers, and intellectuals. Notably, in Eugene ONeills last years, the playwright moved to Boston so that he could live close to Kozols fathers office. In addition to his successful private practice in Boston, Kozol operated in a grim arena marked by extreme violence. But while his role as a forensic expert placed him in the public eye for high-profile criminal defendants such as Albert DeSalvo (the Boston Strangler) and Patty Hearst, he was--as his son articulates--a healer of tormented people, not their judge, not their interrogator. With the same lyricism and clarity that have defined Kozols acclaimed work on education for decades,The Theft of Memory intimately describes Harrys vibrant life, the challenges following his self-diagnosis of Alzheimers, and the evolution of their relationship throughout. This unique biography will have a long shelf life as a moving portrait of an extraordinary man, a window into the heart of one of our nations foremost education activists, and a frank examination of how we come to terms with caregiving-- Read more...
Abstract: National Book Award winner Jonathan Kozol is best known for his fifty years of work among our nations poorest and most vulnerable children. Now, in the most personal book of his career, he tells the story of his fathers life and work as a nationally noted specialist in disorders of the brain and his astonishing ability, at the onset of Alzheimers 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 ONeill, 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 doctors 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 Harrys 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 Id 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--
House author Jonathan Kozols deeply personal biography of his father, a brilliant neurologist who suffered from Alzheimers.There are few writers of conscience who write as beautifully as Jonathan Kozol.Departing from the South Bronx and turning his sensitive eye to his own life and legacy, The Theft of Memory is Kozols most personal book to date, as it explores the life of his father, Harry. Dr. Harry L. Kozol was a nationally-renowned neurologist whose work helped establish the emerging fields of forensic psychiatry and neuropsychiatry. He was a remarkable clinician with unusual capacity to diagnose and identify neurological and psychotic illnesses in highly complicated and sophisticated people, including well-known artists, writers, and intellectuals. Notably, in Eugene ONeills last years, the playwright moved to Boston so that he could live close to Kozols fathers office. In addition to his successful private practice in Boston, Kozol operated in a grim arena marked by extreme violence. But while his role as a forensic expert placed him in the public eye for high-profile criminal defendants such as Albert DeSalvo (the Boston Strangler) and Patty Hearst, he was--as his son articulates--a healer of tormented people, not their judge, not their interrogator. With the same lyricism and clarity that have defined Kozols acclaimed work on education for decades,The Theft of Memory intimately describes Harrys vibrant life, the challenges following his self-diagnosis of Alzheimers, and the evolution of their relationship throughout. This unique biography will have a long shelf life as a moving portrait of an extraordinary man, a window into the heart of one of our nations foremost education activists, and a frank examination of how we come to terms with caregiving
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Also by Jonathan Kozol
DEATH AT AN EARLY AGE
FREE SCHOOLS
THE NIGHT IS DARK AND I AM FAR FROM HOME
CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION
ON BEING A TEACHER
ILLITERATE AMERICA
RACHEL AND HER CHILDREN
SAVAGE INEQUALITIES
AMAZING GRACE
ORDINARY RESURRECTIONS
THE SHAME OF THE NATION
LETTERS TO A YOUNG TEACHER
FIRE IN THE ASHES
Copyright 2015 by Jonathan Kozol
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN is a registered trademark and the Crown colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kozol, Jonathan, author.
The theft of memory : losing my father, one day at a time / Jonathan Kozol.First edition.
pages cm
1. Kozol, Harry L., 1906Mental health. 2. Alzheimers diseaseBiography. 3. NeurologistsBiography. 4. Fathers and sonsBiography. I. Title.
RC523.2.K68 2015
616.8310092dc23
[B] 2014041699
ISBN9780804140973
eBook ISBN9780804140980
Cover design by Christopher Brand
v4.1
a
For Matthew
with deepest gratitude
This is a book about my father, who was born in 1906 and died seven years ago, in 2008. It is also a story about memory, and memory, among its many inconvenient and anarchic qualities, does not obey the rules of strict chronology. I have made no effort to disguise this.
My recollections of events in my fathers life did not come back to me in single file like so many soldiers marching to a destination. They were prompted by the stories that he told me, those my mother told me, and those that I discovered in the documents and letters and memos to himself, and to other doctors, that he left behind, but most of which he never had a chance to organize before his memory began to fail. So a lifetime of experience has come to me in pieces that dont always fit together perfectly. I havent tried to force them into sequence.
Other questions about memoryquestions that my father raised, questions neuroscientists are posing now in more arresting wayswill be addressed at several points as they present themselves. Inevitably, uncertainties remain. I have had to learn to live with this.
My father was diagnosed with Alzheimers disease in 1994 when he was eighty-eight years old. He was a neurologist, with an extensive practice in psychiatry as well, and had taught for many years at one of Harvards major teaching hospitals. It was one of the doctors he had trained who made the formal diagnosis of his illness.
The earliest signs of problems with his memory appeared about four years before. There would be times when he found it difficult to summon up the name of someone he knew well. Now and then, hed also lose his purchase on a set of facts with which he wanted to support an argument. At other times, hed briefly lose his sense of continuity in the course of what was otherwise a cogent conversation.
But my father had tremendous social competence. Hed navigate these awkward moments with congenial ease. Hed smile at his own mistake, then offer me perhaps a glass of brandy, and sit down and question me about my work, or tell me of a book that he was reading, or share with me an anecdote about his own career.
Sometimes he would light his pipe. (He liked to take his time packing the tobacco.) The aroma of the smoke as it rose up about him remains in my memory, comfortably intertwined with the sense of relaxation, confidence, and calm that I identified with all those other quiet and consoling conversations we had had over the years.
Then, in 1991, he started to get lost at night when hed go out to take a walk in Copley Square, which is in the neighborhood of Boston where he and my mother lived. Hed come home three hours later and report perhaps that he had made friends with a couple visiting from London or Geneva, or that he had been at Buddenbrooks, a bookstore that was close to his apartment, and had had a conversation with a foreign student whom he might have met there. My mother would worry terribly, of course, when he was gone so long. His interesting narratives, I thought, were meant to reassure her.
In spite of his confusions, he continued to try very hard to get some work done every day. He had given up his medical practice by that time, but he was determined to complete some papers hed begunsummations of ideas that hed developed in the course of his career on the neurological and psychiatric origins of certain forms of pathological behavior. A friend of mine, a teaching assistant at a local university, was helping him to organize his thoughts and bring coherence to his writing. On occasion, when my father asked, I would help him too.
It was not long after this, however, that my fathers restlessness would overcome his capability for concentration. After an hour or two of work, he would push the pages aside, get up from his desk, put on his jacket and an overcoat, if it was cold weather, go down to the lobby of the building, and head off into the nearby streets for another of his evening journeys.
One night in 1992, he asked me to sit down with him in a room of his apartment that hed been using to store an old examination table and some other items from his former office. He said there was something he needed to discuss with me. He told me that he hadnt yet decided whether it was wise to discuss this with my mother.
After he had closed the door, and both of us were seated, he started to lay out to me, in fairly graphic terms, what he described as new and more specific indications of problems he was having, which, he said, were clearly neurological. He checked again to be sure the door was firmly closed and then began explaining to me what he meant by more specific indications.
He said that hed been having spellshe added that he did not mean by this the incidents of memory loss, which he called amnestic spells, but something of a different order altogether. He spoke of these as brief attacks of interrupted consciousness during which he recognized a sudden cutoff from my own surroundings, a definite blocking of capacity, lasting maybe only for a millisecond or for several seconds or a trifle more. These episodes, he said, had been preceded in each instance by an aura of impending danger that he likened to the sense of warning epileptics often feel just prior to a seizure.
He did not say this with the urgent sense of self-concern one might expect a series of events like these would ordinarily arouse. Instead, he spoke as if he was attempting to position these events at a distance from himself, so that he could speak of them with the detachment of an interested observer.
I can pinpoint this as a neurologist, he said, and he speculated that his recollection of what hed been observing in himself might hold potential value for clinicians and researchers. For this reason, he plugged in his office tape machine, which he had used to dictate letters and reports on patients he was treating, and he recorded the remainder of our conversation.
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