Colonel Parkinson in Charge

A writers witty and surprisingly optimistic account of learning to live with Parkinsons disease. When he was sixty-five, Franois Gravel was diagnosed with Parkinsons disease, upending the old age he had imagined for himself. As a way of contemplating his new life with a degenerative illness, he turned to what he knew best and loved most: writing. Gravel immersed himself in research on Parkinsons, exploring its medical history and treatments and paying close attention to the changes he experienced, all in service of learning how to best manage his symptoms throughout the advancement of this incurable disease. With a lightness of touch that belies a difficult subject (he imagines Dr. Parkinson as a military man who has set up camp in his brain), Gravel shares what he has learned in a memoir that is at once charming, serious, and moving. He writes, For a long time, I believed that Parkinsons was a disease. Now, I realize its a philosophy course. Colonel Parkinson in Charge is, in some ways, the companion text for this course, engaging with and demystifying a daunting subject to help readers better understand life with Parkinsons disease.