My Stroke of Insight

By Jill Taylor

This is a life changing book describing the experience of having a stroke and recovering from it through the eyes of a brain scientist. A must read for anyone with a loved one experiencing a stroke or brain injury. But actually excellent for anyone with a brain! It is a book of great insight into what we have between our ears and the incredible nature of what we do without even being aware of it! And even more so, it is about gratitude and the way we are human in this world. Ultimately a spiritual book urging us to live with greater levity and appreciation.


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Soldiers Once

My Brother and the Lost Dreams of America's Veterans

The story is about a sister who had a brother who went to Vietnam. He died an early, unexplained death in his 50's which left his estranged family to try to put the pieces of his life back together. This sounds almost ordinary, but the truth is that one of the great tragedies of Vietnam is all the silent death that occurred years and years after its aftermath. Service men came home and were not able to get the support they needed and have struggled in many ways. Suicide rates are notoriously under reported. Post-traumatic stress disorders were flat out denied until very recently. Many, many men who served our country through a perilous, horrific war came home and to this date are not aware that they are due the benefits they earned through the VA System. These injustices are well documented in this book and deserve recognition. We are already making some of the same mistakes with our new veterans coming home from Afghanistan and Iraq, as citizens of this country we owe it to them to try to grasp their experience and sacrifice. This book offers an excellent introduction into that world.

This is a great introduction to war experience. It cannot supplement the many amazing books that document their own personal and real accounts of this experience. However, it is a great introduction and potentially a book to give family members of service men and women or those people who love them to try to help them understand the on-going suffering they may be going through.

Book 11

Grief

Andrew Holleran

Can we recover from grief? That is the primary exploration in this book through a simple story of one man who lost someone he loved. It gently presses the questions grief pointedly asks in the every day real stuff of life. Like whether to get up in the morning or not. How to physically act among other people when you feel distanced and disassociated. Where do you live? How do you interact with the possessions of your loved one?

What is the meaning of grief? Or where is meaning in grief?

Will we ever emerge on the other side and if we do, does this mean the person we are grieving is now gone from this earth? Are they only alive in us and if so what does that mean when others tell us we will get over it?

I really loved this excellent book. I would recommend it as a gift to someone going through grief along with Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking.

"Your grief is the substitute for their presence on earth. Your grief is their presence on earth." Pg 18

"What is better than reading in the same room or house with someone at night? Reading is an activity both communal and separate." Pg 61

"'Which is how people feel when people they love die, ' I said. 'That they are only marking time. That their lives have ended. Like Henry Adams - after his wife killed herself he went on living. He traveled, he moved into the home they had just built, he wrote books. But when someone aske him to speak to a historical society years later, he turned and said, "But didn't you know? I've been dead for fifteen years!"'" Pg 86

"At almost every concert, however, no matter how irritating, there was one piece - sometimes only a passage - that made you feel you'd done the right thing in coming here; that someone else (the composer) had understood, had known, your grief, that life was worth living because of music. At the same time, this music, or piece of music, also made it clear that you were fooling yourself in attempting to go on with your life; that what had happened to the person you loved you would never get over; that you still carried it with you; that it lay beneath all things; and only this music - these few notes - recognized that everything else you had been doing, and would do, to fill up the time was meaningless." Pg 97

Book 10