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

National Book Award winner Jonathan Kozol is best known for his fifty years of work among our nationrsquos poorest and most vulnerable children Now in the most personal book of his career he tells the story of his fatherrsquos life and work as a nationally noted specialist in disorders of the brain and his astonishing ability at the onset of Alzheimerrsquos 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 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 ldquoOne of the most intense relationships of his careerrdquo his son recalls ldquowas with Eugene OrsquoNeill who moved to Boston in the last years of his life so my father could examine him and talk with him almost every dayrdquoAt 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 womenBut The Theft of Memory is not primarily about a doctorrsquos 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 Harryrsquos verbal skills and cogency progressively abandoned him ldquoSomehowrdquo the author says ldquoall 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 Irsquod ever felt beforerdquo 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.