Tens of millions of Americans either suffer from Alzheimer's or care for someone who does. In a single generation, that number will triple. Jeanne Murray Walker's memoir speaks with compassionate wisdom about the gifts that wait to be discovered even in the midst of this grim disease. As Walker cares for her mother during her heartrending decline, she, her sister and her mother develop closer ties. The intimate look at illness and death-hardly acknowledged by our culture-becomes another sort of gift and after spending thousands of hours with her mother, Jeanne begins to recover her own early memories and understand her history in a transformative way. THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY reveals that for all the grim news about Alzheimer's, it is possible to find joy and hope in the midst of pain. The story is made up of three braided strands. Two are narrative: the present story of caring for her mother and the past story of Walker's childhood memories. The third strand is a series of pithy Field Notes that anchor the book in practical reflections on memory. Interwoven are chapters which flash back to Walker's teenage battles with her feisty, valiant, widowed mother. Only because Walker slowed down and spent thousands of hours in the company of her mother during the last decade of her life was she able to recover these memories. The field notes are short, poetic pauses in the narrative that address memory: what it is, how it works, how it can be strengthened, what happens when it goes away. Geography of Memory is the hopeful story about Alzheimer's that readers are waiting to hear.

Sonnets are familiar to us, but not relevant. What do they have to do with our fast-paced, tech-driven, ever-shrinking contemporary world? But what if the sonnet-invented 700 years ago-could come back like a cat with nine lives? A sonnet in the twenty-first century might serve as a sacramental form, calling us from our work-mad lives to quietness and reflection. In Pilgrim, You Find the Path by Walking, Jeanne Murray Walker invites the reader to join her on a journey told in 58 colloquial sonnets, beginning in the slangy streets of New York and ending in the holiness of silence and praise. Stops on the journey include reflections on death and grief, but also praise for a migrating butterfly, a knock on the door, the astonishing ocean. This book is designed to be used as a devotional and read slowly; to be both a book of poetry and a spiritual companion.

"Anyone who can get through a newspaper," Jeanne Murray Walker says, "will find this book a piece of cake." Indeed, the poems in this book are strong but unpretentious pieces rich in meaning and feeling. / The poems in New Tracks, Night Falling acknowledge that we are people driven and divided by fear. They talk about racism, war, loss, greed, alienation, our disregard of the earth, and our disregard of each other. Sometimes we feel like night is falling in the bright light of day. Yet we get glimpses of hope, of what could be: / In this dark time I want to / make light bigger, / to toss it in the air like a pizza chef, / to stick my fists in, stretching it / till I can get both arms into radiance above the elbow / and spin it above us. / Hope continually threads its way through these poems. We hear its voice as Walker writes about choices -- both those we make and those beyond our making. / And we feel hope rising like bread when Walker focuses on the gifts of potential, resolution, mercy, joy -- the new tracks that we can make in fresh snow, on old paths, along the roads more or less traveled. These are stays against the falling night. / With a keen eye for both physical and emotional detail, Walker explores a journey that all of us are on, and she does so in a way that speaks to our deep fears and deeper joys, that engages and inspires. Tempering somber notes with more joyful ones, she reminds us of the good things, great and small, that are still possible in this world.