The Last of His Mind: A Year in the Shadow of Alzheimer's [Hardcover]

John Thorndike (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 23, 2009

Joe Thorndike was managing editor of Life at the height of its popularity immediately following World War II. He was the founder of American Heritage and Horizon magazines, the author of three books, and the editor of a dozen more. But at age 92, in the space of six months he stopped reading or writing or carrying on detailed conversations. could no longer tell time or make a phone call. was convinced that the governor of Massachusetts had come to visit and was in the refrigerator.

Five million Americans suffer from Alzheimer’s, and like many of them, Joe Thorndike’s one great desire was to remain in his own house. To honor this wish, his son John left his own home and moved into his father’s upstairs bedroom on Cape Cod. For a year, in a house filled with file cabinets, photos, and letters, John explored his father’s mind, his parents’ divorce, and his mother’s secrets. The Last of His Mind is the bittersweet account of a son’s final year with his father, and a candid portrait of an implacable disease.

It is the ordeal of Alzheimer’s that draws father and son close, closer than they have been since John was a boy. At the end, when Joe’s heart stops beating, John’s hand is on his chest, and a story of painful decline has become a portrait of deep family ties, caregiving, and love.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In this engrossing memoir, author Thorndike (Anna DeLaney's Child, Another Way Home: A Single Father's Story) tells a touching story of family, death, discovery and devotion, in which Thorndike probes his journalist father's accomplishments and losses, his relationships and his wife's tragic suicide. When his father Joe Thorndike, suffering at age 92 from congestive heart failure and the onset of Alzheimer's disease, can no longer take care of himself, Thorndike offers to live with him. Over the following year, Thorndike chronicles his father's growing incapacity, and seeks to learn more about him despite the dying man's lifelong all-but-impenetrable reserve. While much of the book details Thorndike's difficulties caretaking for his father, he heightens the proceedings with family tales, including some from his father's editorial work at the heyday of Life, working with bold named figures like the Luces, Whittaker Chambers, James Thurber and Winston Churchill. A beautiful book, this memoir reveals the painful chaos of Alzheimer's, as well as the strength, faith and unexpected joys that come with caring for a loved one in his last days.

Review

"A brave, moving story of a son's devotion to his dying father.... Thorndike's prose is serenely beautiful and his patience in caring for an Alzheimer's patient is extremely admirable. An affecting work of emotional honesty and forgiveness." --Kirkus Reviews

The frankness of this haunting memoir is totally disarming. Thorndike addresses the banalities and small tragedies that attend the great event of a lifetime with an unblinking eye. Told in his luminously clear prose, the plain story of the unraveling of a mind and a life find its way into the heart like our own blood. An important, beautiful book --Henry Shukman

What could have been a sad journey down a cul-de-sac becomes, in John Thorndike's hands, a gorgeous, expansive book about families--particularly fathers and sons--about marriage, and about the influences that form us and against which we rebel. As Thorndike is a sensualist, The Last of His Mind is also about touch, a little-considered side of those relationships. I found myself thinking about my own father and son throughout but most of all I found myself unexpectedly caring a lot about old Joe Thorndike, and grateful for the words of the son as the father's slipped away --Ted Conover

“This book tells a hard story, the relentless decline of a father’s memory and self-awareness. John Thorndike writes a beautiful sentence, a beautiful page, and describes his father’s last year with piercing clarity, but also great warmth. He opens a world we will all have to face.”
—Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

In The Last of his Mind, John Thorndike has given us far more than a book on dealing with Alzheimer’s. This taut, clear-eyed memoir of a son caring for his father in his final days is an act of consummate literary bravery, allowing us to witness the final dance between two flawed and admirable men.
Rob Wilder — author of Daddy Needs a Drink and Tales from the Teachers’ Lounge

Here in detail is a story we fear for our loved ones, a story we fear for ourselves. Yet Thorndike also conveys the humor and joy, the contemplation and compassion, and the reconciliation and healing that were part of this journey. The result: The Last of His Mind is both heart-wrenching and heart-warming.
Lady Borton — author of After Sorrow: An American Among the Vietnamese

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 248 pages
• Publisher: Swallow Press; 1 edition (October 23, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0804011222
• ISBN-13: 978-0804011228
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,146,343 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I grew up in Connecticut, read a thousand novels as a child and always wanted to write one. After four desperate years at a New England prep school I went to Harvard, wrote some fiction, studied night and day. Then a master's degree from Columbia, two years in the Peace Corps and a year of doctoral studies at NYU, brought to an end by the delirious sixties, marriage and parenthood. In 1970 my wife and I moved to an isolated farm in Chile, where we lived for two years. When we divorced in 1974, I wound up with custody of our son, Janir.

I settled with him in Athens, Ohio, where for ten years I ran a truck farm. I built some houses, ran an alternative school and started writing, both freelance and fiction. My first two books were novels: Anna Delaney's Child, about a woman whose nine-year-old son dies in a car crash, and The Potato Baron, about a married couple struggling to decide whose life they are going to live. I moved to Colorado for five years and to New Mexico for eight, before coming back to Ohio. My third book was a memoir about raising my son in the face of his mother's schizophrenia: Another Way Home.

In 2005 I moved to Cape Cod to look after my father, whose Alzheimer's was growing worse. He wanted to go on living at home, and I wanted to let him. My latest book, The Last of His Mind, is a memoir of the year he lost everything---even as the two of us grew closer than we'd been since I was a child.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An enlightened shadow, October 16, 2009

By 

Richard M. Mahler (Silver City, NM USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Last of His Mind: A Year in the Shadow of Alzheimer's (Hardcover)

It is a noble truth that we all die and that the moment of our death is unknown. John Thorndike explores this essential inevitability with searing honesty, fierce grace, deep compassion, and a journalist's curiosity. By guiding his father on the 92-year-old's final journey, the author confronts nagging and unresolved questions about his own childhood while simultaneously entering a powerful realignment with the constellation of his entire family--and the trajectory of his own life. Thorndike displays a novelist's love of language, a storyteller's eye for detail, a detective's instinct for sleuthing, and a son's enduring love for the man who molded him in ways that have John alternately smiling and fuming. If you've ever lost a parent to dementia, as I have, you will identify at once with the harrowing experiences the author describes in this elegant and compelling book. More importantly, you will recognize and appreciate the cascade of profound challenges, both physical and mental, that unavoidably befall the caregiver as well as the patient. It is from this rich and freshly disturbed psychic soil that John Thorndike, a life-long farmer in addition to being a talented writer, grows in ways that he is brave enough to share. We are wiser for it. And Joe would be proud.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A beautiful book about family, caring and self awareness., October 12, 2009

By 

Ann M. (Southeastern Ohio) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Last of His Mind: A Year in the Shadow of Alzheimer's (Hardcover)

I live in Athens Ohio, the same town as the author. When I saw a copy in the local bookstore window, the word Alzheimer's caught my eye, along with the very cool retro cover. My father is in a nursing home, suffering from this disease along with the after affects of two major strokes. I've read half a dozen texts on the medical attributes of the disease but this book presented a different viewpoint.

I quickly found myself lost in the incredible story of how caring intimately for ones parent can lead you to discover so much about your own self. Or, at least it leads John Thorndike to have this slowly revealed to him through the long days of care giving. I was also impressed at how engrossed I was in a subject that should have left me depressed but instead I felt uplifted by the experiences the author relayed. The book is a touching journey about going home and finding your place in a family. Although John emotionally sided many years with his mother, in caring for his father the truth of his character is revealed, not through conversation, but through everyday acts, which illustrate the gracious qualities his dad possessed.

The story of Mr. Thorndike's childhood and family in and of itself is very interesting, from his father's brilliant career in magazine publishing to his mother's secretive and devastating sex life, I found the tale of his past to never be far from the situation present. I'm thrilled to see he has an earlier memoir, Another Way Home, in which I can read more about his turn at fatherhood.

Would highly recommend The Last of His Mind to anyone interested in family dynamics, exploring your own personality by examining your past, caring for an elderly parent, an in-depth look at Alzheimer's and anyone who likes to curl up with a good story.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Tough Lessons to be Learned, December 14, 2010

By 

V. Grose (Columbia, SC) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Last of His Mind: A Year in the Shadow of Alzheimer's (Hardcover)

The Last Year of His Life is as much about living and rememberances as it is about learning to cope with Alzheimer's and death. It relates the sacrifice of a son who spends the last year of his father's life with him in the family homestead and how he copes and finds peace with his father and himself. There are many good lessons here for those with aging parents with or without the added burden of Alzheimer's and it is well worth the read.