Susan Allen Toth Ames High Class of 1957 book cover No Saints Around Here published April 14 2014 #AHSauthor
AHS Ames High School Alumni Assoc - Ames, IA
ameshigh.org - reunions - photos - newsletters - authors - calendar - news - deceased - email - letters - join AHSAA
Purchase Susan's book
No Saints around Here: A Caregiver’s Days Kindle Edition
www.amazon.com/No-Saints-around-Here-Caregivers-ebook/dp/...
Support Ames High School authors and purchase their books, they are all great authors.
All Susan Allen Toth books can be found here: www.amazon.com/stores/Susan-Allen-Toth/author/B000AQ6XAK?...
or with other AHS authors.
When we promise “in sickness and in health,” it may be a mercy that we don’t know exactly what lies ahead. Forcing food on an increasingly recalcitrant spouse. Brushing his teeth. Watching someone you love more than ever slip away day by day. As her husband James’s Parkinson’s disease with eventual dementia began to progress, writer Susan Allen Toth decides she intensely wants to keep her husband at home—the home he designed and loved and lived in for a quarter century—until the end.
No saint, as she often reminds the reader, Toth found solace in documenting her days as a caregiver. The result, written in brief, episodic bursts during the final eighteen months of James’s life, has a rare and poignant immediacy. Wrenching, occasionally peevish, at times darkly funny, and always deeply felt, Toth’s intimate, unsparing account reflects the realities of seeing a loved one out of life: the critical support of some friends and the disappearance of others; the elasticity of time, infinitely slow and yet in such short supply; the sheer physicality of James’s decline and the author’s own loneliness; the practical challenges—the right food, the right wheelchair, the right hospital bed—all intricately interlocking parts of the act of loving and caring for someone who in so many ways is fading away.
“We all need someone to hear us,” Toth says of the millions who devote their days to the care of a loved one. Her memoir is at once an eloquent expression of that need and an opening for others. No Saints around Here is the beginning of a conversation in which so many of us may someday find our voices.
About the Author
Susan Allen Toth has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Harper’s, and Vogue, among other publications. Her many books include Blooming, Ivy Days, My Love Affair with England, England As You Like It, and Leaning into the Wind: A Memoir of Midwest Weather (Minnesota, 2006). A longtime teacher and writer-in-residence at Macalester College, Toth currently divides her time between rural Wisconsin and La Jolla, California.
No Saints around Here: A Caregiver's Days
published April 14, 2014
Product details
ASIN : 0816692866
Publisher : Univ Of Minnesota Press; 1ST edition (April 14, 2014)
Language : English
Paperback : 256 pages
ISBN-10 : 9780816692866
ISBN-13 : 978-0816692866
Item Weight : 10.4 ounces
Dimensions : 5.38 x 0.8 x 8 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #584,407 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#398 in Sociological Study of Medicine
#559 in Alzheimer's
#21,287 in Memoirs (Books)
Customer Reviews: 4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 113 ratings
AHS Ames High School Alumni Assoc - Ames, IA
ameshigh.org - reunions - photos - newsletters - authors - calendar - news - deceased - email - letters - join AHSAA
Susan Allen Toth Ames High Class of 1957 book cover No Saints Around Here published April 14 2014 #AHSauthor
AHS Ames High School Alumni Assoc - Ames, IA
ameshigh.org - reunions - photos - newsletters - authors - calendar - news - deceased - email - letters - join AHSAA
Purchase Susan's book
No Saints around Here: A Caregiver’s Days Kindle Edition
www.amazon.com/No-Saints-around-Here-Caregivers-ebook/dp/...
Support Ames High School authors and purchase their books, they are all great authors.
All Susan Allen Toth books can be found here: www.amazon.com/stores/Susan-Allen-Toth/author/B000AQ6XAK?...
or with other AHS authors.
When we promise “in sickness and in health,” it may be a mercy that we don’t know exactly what lies ahead. Forcing food on an increasingly recalcitrant spouse. Brushing his teeth. Watching someone you love more than ever slip away day by day. As her husband James’s Parkinson’s disease with eventual dementia began to progress, writer Susan Allen Toth decides she intensely wants to keep her husband at home—the home he designed and loved and lived in for a quarter century—until the end.
No saint, as she often reminds the reader, Toth found solace in documenting her days as a caregiver. The result, written in brief, episodic bursts during the final eighteen months of James’s life, has a rare and poignant immediacy. Wrenching, occasionally peevish, at times darkly funny, and always deeply felt, Toth’s intimate, unsparing account reflects the realities of seeing a loved one out of life: the critical support of some friends and the disappearance of others; the elasticity of time, infinitely slow and yet in such short supply; the sheer physicality of James’s decline and the author’s own loneliness; the practical challenges—the right food, the right wheelchair, the right hospital bed—all intricately interlocking parts of the act of loving and caring for someone who in so many ways is fading away.
“We all need someone to hear us,” Toth says of the millions who devote their days to the care of a loved one. Her memoir is at once an eloquent expression of that need and an opening for others. No Saints around Here is the beginning of a conversation in which so many of us may someday find our voices.
About the Author
Susan Allen Toth has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Harper’s, and Vogue, among other publications. Her many books include Blooming, Ivy Days, My Love Affair with England, England As You Like It, and Leaning into the Wind: A Memoir of Midwest Weather (Minnesota, 2006). A longtime teacher and writer-in-residence at Macalester College, Toth currently divides her time between rural Wisconsin and La Jolla, California.
No Saints around Here: A Caregiver's Days
published April 14, 2014
Product details
ASIN : 0816692866
Publisher : Univ Of Minnesota Press; 1ST edition (April 14, 2014)
Language : English
Paperback : 256 pages
ISBN-10 : 9780816692866
ISBN-13 : 978-0816692866
Item Weight : 10.4 ounces
Dimensions : 5.38 x 0.8 x 8 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #584,407 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#398 in Sociological Study of Medicine
#559 in Alzheimer's
#21,287 in Memoirs (Books)
Customer Reviews: 4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 113 ratings
AHS Ames High School Alumni Assoc - Ames, IA
ameshigh.org - reunions - photos - newsletters - authors - calendar - news - deceased - email - letters - join AHSAA