Amazon 讀者一致給予 ★★★★★ 評價
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Keeper-Living-Nancy-journey-Alzheimers/dp/1906021651
2009 Wellcome Trust Book Prize* 得主
甫入圍2010年George Orwell獎**
John Bayley: 「這是我讀過關於阿茲海默症的書中，最感人與最重要的ㄧ本。」***
*此獎是特別設立獎勵“文學中的醫學”(medicine in literature)
**以喬治•奧威爾(George Orwell)命名的歐威爾獎(Orwell Prize)是英國最重要的政治新聞和寫作獎電影
***John Bayley是《輓歌～寫給我的妻子艾瑞絲 》作者與劍橋大學教授。〈艾瑞絲梅鐸本人罹患阿茲海默症〉 update!
Andrea Gillies’ KEEPER has been longlisted for the 2010 George Orwell Prize
Andrea Gillies will compete against seventeen other writers for the prestigious Orwell Prize for political writing. In KEEPER, a memoir about being a carer for a relative with Alzheimer’s, Gillies tracks her mother-in-law’s unravelling grasp on everything in everyday life that we take for granted, and interweaves her own brilliantly cogent investigations into the way Alzheimer’s works.
Reviews
‘Thoughtful, informative and true. . . a very good, very necessary book.’---Sir Richard Eyre, Patron of the Alzheimer’s Research Trust
‘This is one of the most moving and important books that I have read on Alzheimer’s.’---John Bayley
‘I was absolutely riveted. This is a wonderful book – honest, upsetting, tender, sometimes angry and often funny – which takes us on a journey into dementia and, in doing so, explores what it means to be human. ‘ ---Deborah Moggach
最新update!
Andrea Gillies’s KEEPER has been awarded the Orwell Prize 2010!
This year’s judges – Jonathan Heawood (director, English PEN), Andrew Holgate (literary editor, Sunday Times) and Francine Stock (writer and broadcaster) – were unanimous in their decision to award the Orwell Book Prize to KEEPER. This year’s judges – Jonathan Heawood (director, English PEN), Andrew Holgate (literary editor, Sunday Times) and Francine Stock (writer and broadcaster) – were unanimous in their decision to award the Orwell Book Prize to KEEPER. “Andrea Gillies’s extraordinary first-hand account of caring for a relative with Alzheimer’s disease rises beyond memoir – although it is a startlingly honest and vivid one – to deliver a radical exploration of identity and memory. She argues powerfully for change in the way we deal with age and senility, a looming political issue for the 21st century.”
Receiving the prize, Gillies said: “We have to face the fact that there is a tsunami of dementia coming our way…it continues to shock me that the official governmental approach is to regard care for dementia sufferers as ‘social care’, something optional and, for the ill person and their families, ruinously expensive. Observing how sufferers are, from the very first, invoiced for being terminally ill has been illuminating and scandalizing. When it comes right down to it, there is nothing more fundamental than the politics of health.”
KEEPER,which also won the inaugural Wellcome Trust Book Prize in November 2009, chronicles Gillies’s experience of caring for her mother-in-law, Nancy, an Alzheimer’s sufferer. It is a moving, honest, and at times very funny call to arms for a more humane approach to the way in which society cares for dementia sufferers.