Phantom Limb (American Lives Series) - Hardcover

Sternburg, Janet

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0803242964 ISBN 13: 9780803242968

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2002

Synopsis

Phantom Limb is a wise and courageous memoir that moves between past and present, chronicling an adult daughter’s journey through the final years of her parents’ lives. A story of discovering love through adversity as well as an inquiry into contemporary neurology and spiritual life, Phantom Limb is a moving meditation on the struggle to make peace with physical and emotional ghosts of the past. Janet Sternburg writes with such warmth and honesty that loss itself becomes luminous: “This is the grace of the last years, the children coming to understand the contradictions in their parents, not to reconcile them but encompass them in a larger love.”

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

"Janet Sternburg has found the perfect metaphor for the tragedy of pain and loss, the ultimate inevitabilities of life."—Bill Moyers.

"A phantom limb is flesh become memory. . . . Sternburg uses the phenomenon as a metaphor for the loss of our loved ones, who remain intimately with us even after they’re gone."—Los Angeles Times Book Review.

"[Sternburg is] every one of us who has cared for aging parents. . . . She has faced the crucial questions: What do we owe to our parents? What do we owe to ourselves?"—The Orange County Register.

"Sternburg accomplishes in a phrase what usually takes pages, even books, to describe. . . . [She] moves from resistance to profound love; her memoir honors the challenges of being a care-taker."—The Jewish Week.

"A mosaic of understanding, reconciliation, and ultimately acceptance."—The Bloomsbury Review.

"Sternburg is so skillful, so acute in her descriptions and so filled with a useful sense of the absurd that the painful becomes transformative."—Jewish Exponent.

Phantom Limb is a wise and courageous memoir that moves between past and present, chronicling an adult daughter’s journey through the final years of her parents’ lives. A story of discovering love through adversity as well as an inquiry into contemporary neurology and spiritual life, Phantom Limb is a moving meditation on the struggle to make peace with physical and emotional ghosts of the past. Janet Sternburg writes with such warmth and honesty that loss itself becomes luminous: "This is the grace of the last years, the children coming to understand the contradictions in their parents, not to reconcile them but encompass them in a larger love."

About the Author:

Janet Sternburg is a widely published poet and essayist whose books include The Writer on Her Work. A faculty member of the California Institute for the Arts, she is also a photographer whose work appears in private and museum collections.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0803242964
• ISBN 13: 9780803242968
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 148