Saving Milly: Love, Politics, and Parkinson’s Disease
Saving Milly: Like, Politics, and Parkinson’s Disease Books
Product Description
Morton Kondracke never proposed to wed Millicent Martinez, but the fiery daughter of a radical labor organizer eventually captured his heart. They married, raised two daughters, and loved and fought passionately for twenty years. Then, in 1987, Milly noticed a glitch in her handwriting, a small tremor that would lead to the shattering diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. Saving Milly is Kondracke’s powerfully tender chronicle of his vital and volatile marriage, one that has endured and deepened in the face of tragedy; it also follows his own transformation from careerist to caregiver and activist, a man who will “fight all the way, without pause or rest, to ‘save’ his beloved Milly.” *
(* Linda Bowles, The Washington Times)Amazon.com Review
Morton Kondracke chronicles his wife’s 13-year battle hostile to Parkinson’s disease with the same attention to nitty-gritty details and shrewd understanding of how power works that distinguish his political commentary. Kondracke doesn’t airbrush how horrible it is to have Parkinson’s (the squeamish should avoid the passages about Milly Kondracke’s two rounds of deep-brain surgery), or how trying it is to live with someone who does (the mere recitation of his caretaking activities will exhaust most readers). He provides unvarnished accounts of the battles among members of the Parkinson’s Action Network and other disease activists competing for limited federal research funds, until they got real and resolute to fight to double the National Institutes of Health’s budget so everyone would get more money. And he refuses to offer a feel-excellent ending charged with fake hope; the book’s closing pages include a grim account of the Kondrackes’ discussions about what to do if she becomes unable to swallow. (They settled on refusing the feeding tube and allowing her to starve to death, which “is not awkward if the patient doesn’t take liquids.”) Offsetting this bleak material is a vibrant, loving, and equally candid portrait of the indomitable Millicent Martinez Kondracke, who started up-ending the admittedly self-absorbed, drivingly ambitious Kondracke’s life from the moment they met in 1966. He’d plotted to marry an Ivy-educated heiress who may possibly further his career; instead he was swept away by a Mexican Jewish American hothead who challenged authority on everything from a botched car repair to the school system’s poor handling of their daughter’s dyslexia. Seeing how powerful she once was, we share her anguish as she descends into disability–and her spouse’s hope that, despite all the current scientific projections, research will provide a leap forward in time to save Milly. –Wendy Smith
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