Mirrored Lives: Aging Children and Elderly Parents

In 1984, Koch, a Vancouver freelance journalist, went to Buffalo, N.Y., to care for his father, Norman, who was living alone in the family home there. A 74-year-old widower, Norman was convalescing from surgery on an arthritic hip and expected to resume an independent existence. But the patient's geriatric ills multiplied, changing him into a senile tyrant during the remaining five years of his life. The youngest of four brothers, the author tended his father with no appreciable help except from professional aides. He recalls the experience in this self-serving, bitterly resentful book about his brothers' failure to share the burden and about coldly impersonal doctors. (Dec.)