Book Review - Always Looking Up

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

I like the title to this book, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist. It makes me smile, I think partially it is a wanting smile. I want to always be looking up even though i know it is only a title to a book and that there is no way Michael J. Fox is looking up all the time surely he must get down in the dumps at times, I want to always bounce back from my troubles with an optimistic attitude.
Which is sort of what this book is about, sure it is a memoir of the last decade of Michael's life living with Parkinson's Disease but at it's heart it is about rolling with the punches. Taking the life you are given, accepting it and making it your own. Being an optimist doesn't mean you never have doubt it just means you don't let the doubt win, you think about it regroup and decide how to deal with it, that is what Michael J Fox has been doing for the last 10 years. He has been dealing with life and as long as you know everything will be OK then you will truly be OK.
Michael has a witty down-to-Earth writing style that is uplifting and comfortable. His books make me happy and although Always Looking Up pretty much brought us up to the current time I really can't wait for the next one, whenever that may be.

Excerpt:

The last ten years, which is really the stuff of this book, began with such a loss: my retirement from Spin City. I found myself struggling with a strange new dynamic: the shifting of public and private personas. I had been Mike the actor, then Mike the actor with PD. Now was I just Mike with PD? Parkinson's had consumed my career and, in a sense, had become my career. But where did all of this leave Me? I had to build a new life when I was already pretty happy with the old one..




Currently "Reading":
Magazine - Still Good Housekeeping
Book - The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley
Audio - Touch and Go: A Memoir by Studs Terkel