Glory Walk or DHEA

Glory Walk: A Memoir

Author: Cathryn E Smith

The Glory Walk is more than a memoir about Cathryn E. Smith's father. It is a multi-layered narrative that captures readers and propels them into the heart of a powerful story. Using an absorbing blend of creative styles and unusual imagery, Smith gives voice not only to each person in the story but also to the Alzheimer's disease that steals her father's life. Her distinctive writing style weaves prose, letters, conversations, poems, and music into an extraordinary literary experience that starts with fractured memories and ends with a life-affirming picture of one man's and one family's "glory walk."

author, The House on Eccles Road - Judith Kitchen

Smith grants her father the dignity of her memory. She arranges a collage-dreamscape, childhood memories, and more, even the imagined chaotic interior voice of the disease itself-into a tribute. It's fascinating how we get to know this familyЉ. Everyone comes alive.

author, Ideas and Details - Garrett M. Bauman

The Glory Walk will crush and rebuild your heart on each page. It is superbly written, vivid, achingly honest, with a plainness and vitality that can come only from genuine feeling.

Publishers Weekly

This memoir of a father's struggle with Alzheimer's wavers from luminous to baffling. Its structure is nonlinear, punctuating straightforward memories of Smith's father's illness with dream sequences, conversations written in play form, poetry and excerpts from scholarly journals. This approach makes for a fragmented narrative, but determined readers should persevere for Smith's straightforward sections, which trace the disease's course with precision and grace. Her sentiments are sure to echo the experience of anyone who has lost a loved one to Alzheimer's. For instance, she imagines telling the well-intentioned but not terribly sensitive nurse at her father's nursing home, "I'll just wait down here while you wave some magic wand or clunk him on the head if you have to, just get him out of those diapers and into a nice Sunday suit and we'll go to... lunch, have a whiskey sour and rum punch, eat all the cashews out of the nut mix, take two popovers instead of one, play with the electric windows in the Buick." Smith's gift for communicating her wish to be anywhere but her present situation is especially apparent as she writes about the undignified death of her formerly affable and easygoing father. She describes her last memory of him, waving good-bye from a chair, and writes, "If I tip [the memory] a bit, as if holding a small mirror in the light, maybe then I can see that it isn't really my father at all but a little boy playing spaceman.... He is waving to the cheering crowd as he prepares to blast off." Such descriptions make this overly ambitious book worthwhile. (May 31) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Table of Contents:

   Introduction
Rim

Part

Look this: Mexican Politics or Economics of Buiness Policy

DHEA: A Comprehensive Review

Author: JHH Thijssen

This is a high-level research text analyzing the latest studies of dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), sometimes described as the "anti-aging pill," "pep pill," or even "fountain of youth." It contains six chapters by world experts on the physiopathology of DHEA sulfate, the neuroactive properties of DHEA and DHEA sulfate, DHEA transformation into androgens and estrogens, DHEA in metabolic diseases, the use and effect of DHEA in humans, and DHEA use in postmenopausal women. Includes bibliographic references and index.

Booknews

Comprises six papers probing endocrinological and epidemiological aspects of the "anti-aging" adrenal steroid Dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), from a December 1997 workshop sponsored by the International Health Foundation in Bosch en Duin, the Netherlands. They reflect renewed interest in the physiopathology of DHEA, as decreasing DHEA plasma levels with age has led to controversial speculation about its role in the aging process and incidence of age- associated pathologies. The workshop was dedicated to David de Wied, former director of the Rudolf Magnus Institute for Neurosciences, Utrecht U. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)