The Theft of Memory: Losing My Father, One Day at a Time

A Library Journal Best Book of 2015 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.

About the Author :
JONATHAN KOZOL is the author of Death at an Early Age, Savage Inequalities, Amazing Grace, and other award-winning books about young children and their public schools.

Review :
“Among Jonathan Kozol’s gifts as a writer is his ability to enter the world of his subjects, to live in the country of their experience and to tell their stories with clarity and compassion. This beautifully told personal account is further enriched by an abiding family love.” —Washington Post “Poignant...Less about the loss of memory than the effort to create a testament to forgiveness and love.” —Boston Globe “Heartwarming...The Theft of Memory celebrates the bond between father and son in thoughtful, often beautiful prose.” —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel “The author’s approach is shrewd yet warmly empathetic; he is curious about how the mind’s gradual breakdown exposes its machinery, and raptly attuned to the emotional effects of these changes on his parents and himself. The result is a clear-eyed and deeply felt meditation on the aspects of family that age does not ravage.” —Publishers Weekly [starred] “Readers familiar with the emotional toll exacted by a loved one with Alzheimer's will embrace Kozol's nostalgic, often heart-wrenching narrative as an important addition to the genre. A compassionate, cathartic, and searingly intimate chronicle of a crippling condition.” —Kirkus Reviews [starred] “[A] beautifully written love letter.”—Booklist [starred] “The Theft of Memory is a stirring, at times heartbreaking book about a brilliant doctor’s valiant fight for his dignity following a devastating Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Jonathan Kozol delivers this compelling narrative of his father’s life and final years with extraordinary tenderness. Straight from the heart of one of our most thoughtful writers, this book is a revelation, offering both a celebration of the bond between a father and son and an insightful glimpse into the workings of our memories and the legacies we leave behind.” —Gay Talese, author of A Writer's Life “Jonathan Kozol accomplishes something remarkable in The Theft of Memory: He preserves the essence of his father in the one place disease cannot touch him—on paper. As his father, a brilliant, Harvard-trained neurologist, falls deeper and deeper into the darkness of dementia, Kozol illuminates his father’s past in jigsaw: through stories, research papers, patient histories, love letters, old stethoscopes—creating a soulful collage of a great man by his supremely gifted son.” —Susannah Cahalan, author of Brain on Fire “For a number of reasons, many of us avoid thinking about old age, fading health, and death. Kozol’s plainly and powerfully written book about his remarkable father is a notable and compassionate exception. It deserves to live on a small shelf with John Mortimer on Mortimer senior, Didion on Dunne, Bayley on Iris Murdoch, and Gawande on Gawande…A fine and often eloquent book about holding on while letting go.” —Lawrence Hartmann, M.D., Past President, American Psychiatric Association