The Last of His Mind
John Thorndike
Joe Thorndike is a reserved and thoughtful New Englander, a former Managing Editor of Life and the founder of American Heritage. He’s written several books himself, but is now losing both memory and language. Still, he wants to stay in his own house. After visiting a friend in a nursing home and watching the patients stare into space, he tells his son John, Don’t ever put me in a place like that.
To look after him, John moves into his house on Cape Cod. Soon Joe has trouble telling time or making a phone call. He no longer reads or remembers how to tie his shoes. At one point he’s convinced that Mitt Romney, the governor of Massachusetts, has come to visit and is in the refrigerator. He forgets that his bathroom has a toilet and uses the floor instead.
Night and day, father and son are thrown together, and their troubles pull them close. The Last of His Mind is a bittersweet account of the year they shared, and a candid portrait of an implacable disease.
Paperback ISBN: 979-8-9932607-6-1
Ebook ISBN: 979-8-9932607-5-4
Audio book ISBN: COMING SOON
Acclaim for The Last of His Mind by John Thorndike
- A Washington Post Best Book of 2009
- A Publishers Weekly Indie Top 20 selection
- A Foreword Book of the Year in Autobiography/Memoir
“A beautiful book, this memoir reveals the painful chaos of Alzheimer’s, as well as the unexpected joys that come with caring for a loved one in his last days.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A brave, moving story of a son's devotion to his dying father. An affecting work of emotional honesty and forgiveness.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“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, author of Writing Down the Bones
“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.”
—Ted Conover, author of Coyotes, Newjack, and Cheap Land Colorado
Author John Thorndike
John Thorndike grew up in New England, graduated from Harvard, took an MA from Columbia, then lit out for Latin America. He spent two years in the Peace Corps in El Salvador and two, with his wife and child, on a back-country farm in Chile. Eventually he settled with his son in Athens, Ohio, where for ten years his day job was farming. Then it was construction. He has written five novels and a pair of memoirs: Another Way Home, about his wife’s schizophrenia and his life as a single parent, and The Last of His Mind, which describes his father’s year-long descent into Alzheimer’s. He lives in Athens, Ohio.
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