MEMOIR
Thirty Days: A Journey to the End of Love
MARK RAPHAEL BAKER
Text, $32.99
Mark Baker has devoted a good deal of his life to what Frances Yates called the art of memory. As a historian with a deep commitment to studies of the Holocaust and genocide, he has moved with a sensitive but honest tread through painful terrain.
This is true in a personal way of Thirty Days, his account of the last 10 months in the life of his wife, Kerryn, who died of cancer in March, 2016; she was only 55. Kerryn and Mark had been married for 32 years; they’d been to school together and teamed up early in life. Kerryn, who seems to have been the practical side of the partnership, became a doctor. Mark, more of an idealist, moved from Socialist Zionism into an academic career.
Read the full review by Michael McGirr at the Sydney Morning Herald.