| Plot Summary of Elder Rage |
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"Jacqueline Marcell is a former college professor and television executive, who gives up her life to go take care of her elderly ill parents. She struggles through 40 caregivers and cries rivers for a year before she succeeds in solving the endless crisis and relates the story with love and unexpected humor. What she doesn't understand is that her father's deeply engrained life-long negative behavior pattern of screaming and yelling to get his way (though never at her before), is becoming intermittently distorted with the onset of dementia, namely--Alzheimer's.
After fighting through an unsympathetic medical system and enduring her “Jekyll & Hyde” father's rages, her ingenuity and loving persistence turns around a seemingly impossible situation with her difficult father, and changes a life-altering near-family tragedy into a success book that's having a broad appeal, considering that over 50 million Americans struggle to provide care for aging family members and friends.
Solutions finally arrive when she finds a geriatric dementia specialist who uncovers her father's early stage Alzheimer's disease. (His regular doctors missed it completely.) Medication is prescribed to slow the dementia down and improve cognitive functioning (Aricept, Exelon or Reminyl), and then the aggression, and (often-present) depression are treated.
After balancing her father with optimal nutrition, as well as Vitamin E, anti-oxidants and anti-inflammatory therapies, Marcell implements her own "Elder Behavior Modification 101", consisting of rewards & consequences (because his short-term memory was still quite good), and succeeds in turning around his bad behaviors--the majority of the time. When that doesn't work she uses distraction, redirection, reminiscence and validation… but discovers that the offer of his favorite ice cream usually works best to get him in the shower.
The final key is getting herself into a support group, and getting both parents out of bed ("waiting to die") and enrolled in physical and emotional therapies at an Adult Day Health Care facility--which completely turns their lives around at 80 and 85.
The impressive list of high-profile endorsements include: Hugh Downs, Regis Philbin, Dr. Dean Edell, the late Steve Allen, Jacqueline Bisset, Ed Asner, Dr. Bernie Siegel, John Bradshaw, Dr. John Gray, Betty Friedan, Julie Harris, Art Linkletter, Leeza Gibbons, Robert Stack, Dr. Nancy Snyderman/ABC News, Erin Brockovich, Johns Hopkins Memory Clinic, Duke University Center For Aging, Dr. Eric Tangalos/Mayo Clinic, Dr. Rudy Tanzi/Harvard Medical School, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, and the National Adult Day Services Association.
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Jacqueline Marcell, Resident Scholar
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| Review Analysis of Elder Rage |
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Our unique search engine provides a wealth of detail about books by breaking them down into many different literary elements, all of which are searchable (click here).
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Ratings are on a 1-10 scale (Low to High)
Plot
Family, hate
Yes
Struggle with:
- Father
The difficult family member
- expects to be obeyed in all things
- is mentally ill
- blames for things that go wrong
- is chronically crotchety
Family, ill
Yes
Who?
- Father
because he/she is
- mentally ill
Period of greatest activity?
- 1950+
Subject of Biography
Gender
- Male
Profession/status:
- unemployed
Age:
- 60's-90's
Eccentric/Mental
Yes
Eccentric:
- obsessed
Ethnicity
- White
Nationality
- German
How sensitive is this person?
- hard edged
Sense of humor
- Cynical sense of humor
Intelligence
- Smarter than most other people
Physique
- physically sick
Setting
United States
Yes
The US:
- California
Century:
- 1980's-Present
Style
Person
- mostly 1st
Accounts of torture and death?
- explicit references to deaths
Book makes you feel?
- encouraged
Is book humorous?
Yes
If humorous, kind of humor
- puns
- eccentric personalities
- Dry-cynical
- slapstick
- parody
- satire
- metaphorical
Lot of foul language?
Yes
Commentary on society?
Yes
Commentary on
- dying
Unusual Style:
- a lot of play on words
- a lot of flashback and forwards
- a lot of stream of consciousness
Writer's slant towards subject:
- very favorable
Story of entire life, or part?
- story of set of events during life
How much dialogue in bio?
- roughly even amounts of descript and dialog
How much of bio focuses on most famous period of life?
- 0-25% of book
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