Saving Milly: Love, Politics, and Parkinson's Disease (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

Morton Kondracke chronicles his wife's 13-year battle against 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 difficult 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 decided to fight to double the National Institutes of Health's budget so everyone would get more money. And he refuses to offer a feel-good ending charged with false 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 painful 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 began up-ending the admittedly self-absorbed, drivingly ambitious Kondracke's life from the moment they met in 1966. He'd planned to marry an Ivy-educated heiress who could further his career; instead he was swept away by a Mexican Jewish American firebrand 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 husband's hope that, despite all the current scientific projections, research will provide a breakthrough in time to save Milly. --Wendy Smith