Overview

All the Ways You Taught Us chronicles the sixty-year love story between Mort Gordon, a theoretical physicist blinded by retinitis pigmentosa, and Bernice, his wife and reader, who loses mobility from the spina bifida she was born with. After they've died, daughter Janet discovers a cache of love letters full of hope for a successful marriage. The couple's ingenuity enables Mort, even as his sight disappears, to design innovative particle accelerators. Working for decades at the Michigan State University Cyclotron Laboratory, Mort helps other scientists see the unseen. Bernice reads physics aloud almost every day. As a child, Janet found her parents completely capable even as she began to understand their difficulties. Janet reflects on how the parenting skills of Mort and Bernice help her find meaning-in Jewish culture, in science, in literature, and in American democracy, not just as a child, but as they all grow. Both mother and father insist on deep inquiry into the fundamentals of their world. We follow these influential parents until they can no longer manage daily activities alone. Conflicts and disappointments along the way raise questions about love, forgiveness and the limitations of simple distinctions like ""ability"" and ""disability."" The author conducts an examination of what we do for each other and how we gain from the doing-from one generation to the next. She must balance the responsibilities of a daughter with the concerns of a modern working wife and mother. This family memoir will appeal to those interested in how a scientist works every day at the edge of discovery, in disability stories, and in Jewish life. It highlights American political perspectives and gender roles through the second half of the 20th century and the early 2000s. Traditional ideas about care, dependence and worth are challenged throughout. We root for this family to succeed.

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Janet Rebecca Gordon was born in Gainesville, Florida and grew up in East Lansing, Michigan. The author now lives in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC where she has benefited from workshops on memoir at The Writer's Center, in Bethesda, Maryland and at Politics and Prose, a community bookstore. All the Ways You Taught Us, A Memoir of Ability, Disability and the Pursuit of Meaning is Janet's first book. She writes in Medium about travel in the slow lane: from New York to Paris, she frames observations on art and the art of absorbing a place. Janet finds a home at Temple Micah, a synagogue in Washington DC, where she volunteers to promote wise aging and assist refugee resettlement. Before leaving the federal government in 2018, she had a long career crafting programs to encourage bank financial services that support low- and moderate-income people and communities. More information on Janet and her projects is available at www.janrgordonink.com.

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