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Hi All, This book is available online at Amazon.Com Saving Milly: Love, Politics, and Parkinson's Disease by Morton Kondracke, Michael J. Fox Usually ships in 24 hours $20.00 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1586480375/theeconomist/104-9837176-8746302 Morton Kondracke, author of “Saving Milly”, is executive editor of Roll Call, part of The Economist Group. Here is a Review by Charlotte Johnson-Wahl. May 24th 2001 From The Economist print edition Saving Milly: Love, Politics, and Parkinson’s Disease. By Morton Kondracke. PublicAffairs; 300 pages; $25 and £17.99 MORTON KONDRACKE, an American political journalist, is a practised observer of the Washington scene. He lives there with his remarkable wife, Milly, who is dying of Parkinson’s disease. To read “Saving Milly”, his account of her struggle, is a harrowing experience, though not always in ways he intended. It is an honest but needlessly frank story of marriage, illness, anger and love, set against a battleground of fund-raising to find a cure. In some detail he describes his conversion from striving, successful media personality—a self-confessed rotter who wanted to marry someone grander than Milly and who was irked when she first fell ill—into a saintly spouse ungrudgingly tending to a failing wife. Their story is in many places uplifting, and it would be inhuman not to want to sympathise. But with all confessional books of this kind there is a serious problem of tone and intent. Who wants to read about his “slow-dancing” Milly to the bathroom to change her “disposable underwear”, or about her drooling, her gagging and their jokes about enemas? Mr Kondracke’s is not the only recent literary blossom from a newly heroic adult-nappy changer. In “Elegy for Iris”, John Bayley, a literary critic and professor of English, similarly assaulted readers with the horrendous realities of looking after his wife, Iris Murdoch, a distinguished novelist, when, suffering from senile dementia, she could no longer look after herself. Need either writer have so encumbered us with the detail of their wives’ bodily failures? As to intent, Mr Kondracke’s Milly was “a master of her universe”, “a dynamo” who got him into Alcoholics Anonymous and off drink. Then, with illness, things change again. Soon, we read, he is completely at her beck and call, her champion. Is he now fulfilled or frightened to be indispensably on top, the hand that rocks the cradle? For a husband or wife to feel wrenching conflict when caring for a dying spouse is completely to be expected. Isn’t such self-revelation best left in a diary to be read, if at all, after death? This reviewer knows from experience that Parkinson’s is a monster. Milly is particularly unlucky in having an unusually vicious form known as Parkinson-plus syndrome. It is swifter in its destruction of the central nervous system and responds poorly to symptomatic palliation. Milly is to be pitied. But the Kondrackes have many friends and even a prayer group on their case. She is fortunate, too, in having a feisty, stick-around husband, and the attention of two permanent carers. Many Parkinson’s sufferers will warm to this book’s brave, upbeat approach. Yet, though the sections on politicking for more research money are unquestionably important, this reader did not find that “Saving Milly” held larger human lessons. Mr Kondracke calls his disease campaigning “God’s work”, and reports that God told him to “Take care of Milly”. Heavy name-dropping—from the White House down through high places in Hollywood and back up to God—is both dazzling and sad. Mr Kondracke knows all these people and needs God too? For plenty of us with it, Parkinson’s is bad news all the way down. Despite the Kondrackes’ valiant efforts, Milly continues to weaken and will soon die because there is no cure. So, to end on a less bitter note, if “Saving Milly” can prompt the giving of money for more Parkinson’s research, then it will have been worth the effort of writing and reading—most of it. http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=631014&CFID=2304161&CFTOKEN=51209889 ****** ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn