Feb '10 Bk Selection by Jean Sager: Old Friends by Tracy Kidder

Hi,
I have thought a lot about my February 2010 Book Club selection.
I have settled on Tracy Kidder's Old Friends (published 1993). It is not our typical subject to read about--the lives of people in a nursing home.

Maybe because I am older and can foresee a time when my body won't let me live independently or because I spent so much time visiting my Grandmother in the nursing home that the book attracted me.

The life in a nursing home is slice of life that often gets ignored. Since Mr Kidder spent a year observing life in a nursing home, he writes with great objectivity and appreciation for the details of human interactions of the personal lives of Joe and Lou. These two men share a small room. As they observe their surroundings and comment on the people around them, we see the universal human condition. It is simply life on a smaller planet -- and maybe a bit further from the sun.

The author has written many books. The Soul of a New Machine (1981) for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. He also wrote
Mountains beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World (2003) which I'm not sure if it was our Book Club selection. The Mountains book was about a doctor who taught at Harvard but focused his life on improving Haiti's infectious diseases and founded Partners in Health.

Mr. Kidder also wrote Home Town (1999) , Among Schoolchildren (1989), House (1985), My Detachment (2005), and Strength in What Remains (2009).

If you want to look at the reviews of these books you can use the Ann Arbor Library's search for Tracy Kidder and click on the right to the review you want:
http://www.aadl.org/catalog/search/author/%22Kidder%252C%2BTracy.%22

I think because Old Friends reads well and puts a different lens on our lives that it will be a lively discussion book It is not a criticism of nursing homes nor expose' book. One could say the book jumps ahead to read the final pages of life.

Below are two book reviews (from the Library Journal and the Booklist.)
on this book:
Book Review
Old Friends
by Kidder, Tracy


Library Journal
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Terms of Use
As in his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Soul of a New Machine ( LJ 8/81 ), House ( LJ 1/86), and the best-selling Among Schoolchildren ( LJ 1/90), Kidder reveals his extraordinary talent as a storyteller by taking the potentially unpalatable subject of life in a nursing home and making it into a highly readable, engrossing account. Through the eyes of roommates Lou and Joe, we experience daily life in the Linda Manor Nursing Home in Northampton, Massachusetts. Kidder displays an uncanny ability to reveal glimpses of the residents' former lives and their current hopes and fears without becoming sentimental or maudlin. This is a life that we all hope to avoid, both for ourselves and our loved ones; yet when we see it as it is portrayed in Old Friends it becomes less terrifying. This wonderfully different book is an essential purchase. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/93.-- January Adams, ODSI Research Lib., Raritan, N.J.
Book Review
Old Friends
by Kidder, Tracy


Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
Terms of Use
What is riveting about Kidder's new book is not the alien (and alienating) elements of life at Linda Manor nursing home, though those elements are certainly evident. But Old Friends celebrates the persistence into advanced age of the capacity for love, friendship, and simple human decency. Kidder is, as in his last two books, an impersonal observer as Lou Freed, 90, and Joe Torchio, 72, adjust to living together in a small room and feel their way toward a friendship worth treasuring; as the recently admitted Earl comes to grips with the likelihood that his worsening heart condition will keep him from ever going home; as Eleanor, raised in vaudeville, organizes plays and revues; as the nudniks engage in their morning Stupidvising; as various Linda Manor patients cope with their physical and mental limitations, with nursing home food and rules and daily defecation checks, and with each other. Old Friends is not the definitive book on the long-term-care problem in the U.S., and some readers will no doubt be disappointed that Kidder chooses to explore the details of his primary subjects' fascinating lives rather than the statistics and statutes and economic variables that define the parameters of that devastating social problem. To justify his focus, Kidder might borrow Joe Torchio's reaction to his remarkable roommate's oft-told stories: "Lou's memories contained such a density of life that in their presence death seemed impossible." (Reviewed Sept. 15, 1993)0395593034Mary Carroll