Publisher's Synopsis
"Conversations with My Grandchildren: Truths and Nothing But the Truth" tells the story of the rapid mental and physical deterioration of the author's 90 year old mother, a first generation American Jew brought up in a world of discrimination and hope, who, beginning with her response to an ad seeking "retread housewives" went on to author social studies textbooks for elementary and middle school children, which led to her never-ending quest to discern the "truths" of democracy, which "unsuccessfully" ended with her effort to be allowed to die with dignity and minimal pain from what she incorrectly self-diagnosed as a fatal hip fracture. The author's mother began this book, spending the last ten years of her life writing a book to her grandchildren regarding the challenges of growing up in a democracy, focusing particularly on her own history of facing and overcoming anti-Semitism in her neighborhood, at school and at work, and on her becoming part of a reshaping of the American educational system following the "panic" which ensued from the Soviet Union's winning the race to send life into space. The author finished the book, detailing a series of bizarre, semi-comic and in hindsight, inevitable events, which turned his mother from a fiercely independent woman to an invalid at a nursing home, resulting from what she described as her being "kidnapped by the ambulance driver," who happened to be driving by when she fell and broke her hip coming back from the library. The book, weaving in the author's mother's own writings, chronicles the author's increasing awareness of his own failure to recognize his mother's failing health over time, the unfortunate role that the healthcare system played in speeding up that deterioration, and the author's complete inability, despite his background in helping to mold the law regarding a "patient's right to die," to have any influence over the series of events which befell his mother. The book, self-deprecatingly described as the sequel to "Tuesdays with Morrie," gives a sometimes day by day, sometimes week by week or month to month account of the author's increasingly frustrating conversations with his mother, as well as his mother's quite successful conversations with her grandchildren, both told through her book, and told through the years.
