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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 921 SKLOOT | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
In December 1988 Floyd Skloot was stricken by a virus that targeted his brain, leaving him totally disabled and utterly changed. In the Shadow of Memory is an intimate picture of what it is like to find oneself possessed of a ravaged memory and unstable balance and confronted by wholesale changes in both cognitive and emotional powers. Skloot also explores the gradual reassembling of himself, putting together his scattered memories, rediscovering the meaning of childhood and family history, and learning a new way to be at home in the world. Combining the author's skills as a poet and novelist, this book finds humor, meaning, and hope in the story of a fragmented life made whole by love and the courage to thrive.
Author Notes
Floyd Skloot is the author of three novels, four collections of poetry, and a collection of essays
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this remarkable collection of essays, part of the American Lives series (edited by Tobias Wolff), Skloot (The Night Side) conveys what it is like to live with a damaged brain. In 1988, Skloot was beset by a virus that left him with brain lesions (static dementia) that dramatically affected his ability to think. (Because of this condition, each piece here took one to two years to complete and was constructed laboriously in small periods of time.) He often cannot find an appropriate word and may say, for example, "pass the sawdust" instead of "pass the rice." He forgets faces, names, directions and how to perform simple tasks, and suffers from loss of balance. Skloot, now in his late 50s, movingly describes how, despite his losses, he feels enriched by the life he shares with his very supportive wife, Beverly, in a quiet rural environment. Of particular interest is an account of a month that the couple spent on Ireland's Achill Island. Another section deals with his struggle to come to terms with a harsh childhood during which his mother, now in her 90s and sliding into dementia herself, routinely beat and abused him and his brother. The author also details, without self-pity, how he was subjected by the Social Security Administration to a series of tests to prove that his illness was organically based and his disability status legitimate. This is an unusual and engrossing memoir written with intelligence, honesty, perception and humor. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
In this rarest of travel books, readers journey deep into the unimaginable world of dementia. But no dispassionate neurobiologist or theoretical psychologist serves as guide for the journey. In revealing the disorienting features of this strange mental landscape--the gaping lapses of memory, the sudden lurches in logic, the dizzying failures of balance--poet and essayist Skloot is taking us into the recesses of his own disease-stricken mind. With unsentimental clarity, Skloot recounts how a viral infection plunged him into the nightmare of severe neurological disorder--his memory ravaged, his intelligence impaired, his rationality unseated. What will amaze readers, however, is the poise--and even humor--with which Skloot turns personal catastrophe into literary reflection. These reflections convert neurological fact into poignant insight on how brain failure at once imperils and reveals the human essence. That essence shines brightly in Skloot's valiant struggle to deal with his own plight at the very time his mother is spiraling into the living death of Alzheimer's and his brother is succumbing to diabetes. Perhaps because so many of his memories have vanished into the black hole of disease, Skloot unfolds each of his remaining recollections as fragments of a precious mosaic of meaning. A remarkable literary achievement. Bryce Christensen
Table of Contents
| Preface | p. ix |
| Acknowledgments | p. xiii |
| Part 1 Gray Area | |
| 1. Gray Area: Thinking with a Damaged Brain | p. 3 |
| 2. Wild in the Woods: Confessions of a Demented Man | p. 18 |
| 3. In the Shadow of Memory | p. 29 |
| 4. Reeling through the World: Thoughts on the Loss of Balance | p. 43 |
| 5. Living Memory | p. 55 |
| Part 2 The Family Story | |
| 6. The Painstaking Historian | p. 71 |
| 7. Zip | p. 87 |
| 8. Dating Slapsie | p. 103 |
| 9. The Family Story | p. 114 |
| 10. The Year of the 49-Star Flag | p. 132 |
| Part 3 A Measure of Acceptance | |
| 11. Kismet | p. 151 |
| 12. Counteracting the Powers of Darkness | p. 165 |
| 13. What Is This and What Do I Do with It? | p. 178 |
| 14. A Measure of Acceptance | p. 195 |
| 15. Jangled Bells: Meditations on Hamlet and the Power to Know | p. 208 |
| 16. The Watery Labyrinth | p. 218 |
| 17. Tomorrow Will Be Today | p. 229 |
