“A World of Light sheds a warm bright light on so many things, a round house in the snow, the connection and disconnections our minds make, memory and the tricks it plays, but mostly on a heart’s looking back to see beyond.”—Beverly D’Onofrio, author of Riding in Cars with Boys and Looking for Mary
“A World of Light is much more than a memoir: part history, part science, part baseball and literature and Broadway and art. But above and beyond all that, Floyd Skloot’s beauty of a book reveals for us the importance, for better and worse, of life and love, and why we must remember, and remember, and remember.”—Bret Lott, author of Jewel and Fathers, Sons, and Brothers
“A powerful and poignant book that sings along because of Skloot’s elegant style, irresistible humor, and unique perspective. Indeed, only someone with his unusual background could have written it. By turns smart, funny, observant, and insightful, he is the perfect guide to the world of dementia.”—Diane Ackerman, author of A Natural History of the Senses and An Alchemy of Mind
“Skloot has developed a style and voice that are distinctly his own. To combine passion and clarity of vision, humor and the horrific, is not easy, but Skloot’s essays pack enough wisdom to convince us that he is a man larger than the sum of his frustration and grief. . . . A World of Light is Skloot at his strongest and most affecting. His brain virus, awful as it was and still is, has made him an exceptional writer and an equally exceptional person.”—Sanford Pinsker, The Sewanee Review
"A cool, accomplished essayist excavates his past, including a bout of lost memory and his mother's Alzheimer's."—Editors' Choice, New York Times Book Review
“This collection of brilliant essays bears witness to the astonishing strength, spirit, and sense of humor with which [Skloot] has reconstructed his life and personal history.”—Booklist (starred review)
"The book is more than a collection of the personal memories he so doggedly seeks; it also functions as a reflection about cognition, literature and writing, music, growing up and simple living. The author's immense effort in putting back together his mental and physical life is at turns funny, chilling and inspiring. He goes beyond merely making sense of his condition by showing how reaching outward can heal one's inner damage."—Publishers Weekly
"He offers spare sentences that evoke a world. . . . Deserves a wide audience."—Kirkus Reviews
“Simultaneously humorous, frightening, and sad, the essays capture the world in which increasingly more elderly people live, where the body has outlived the mind. . . . [T]hese human and engaging familial essays make us realize the necessity of living fully in the present.”—Library Journal
“Skloot . . . write[s] an engaging and powerful essay. . . . The author is a talented writer for whom literary creativity is clearly an essential part of how he navigates life with his own memory impairment. . . . The book is recommended for medical humanities courses, especially those for which writings on the experience of neurologic devastation would be worthwhile. The essays are well written and at times quite amusing, despite the seriousness of the topic.”—Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)
*Four Stars*"A masterful effort. Words like 'nourishing' and 'grace' paint a fair picture of reviewers' tones; they respect his accomplishment as much as they respect the effort that must have gone into creating it. It makes one believe that, if we only remembered what was important, life might be much more rewarding."—Bookmarks Magazine
"Breathtaking. . . . Skloot writes with eloquence and humor. . . . Skloot's memoir is constructed much the way his memories now work, moving back and forth through time, zipping from one subject to the next, and all the while creating indelible portraits of Skloot's life with both his mother and his supportive wife. Buttressing the story are fascinating details about how and what we remember, why emotionally tinged memories stay more powerfully in our mind, and how Skloot's writing keeps the virus that seems hellbent on quieting him at bay. 'The thing I had to do was write about the experience, refuse the silence,' Skloot says. And here, he's done it brilliantly and with grace."—Caroline Leavitt, Boston Globe
"The emotion here runs deep, but it is contained by the author's probing intelligence. . . . Skloot knows something of grace, but he has left failure far behind. He has painstakingly rebuilt his life and his art, shaping the experience of crippling illness into dazzling literature. . . . Floyd Skloot is the Willie Mays of memoirists."—Mark Essig, San Francisco Chronicle
"Skloot, the author of In the Shadow of Memory, is an accomplished writer. In this collection of polished essays, he excavates his own past, contrasting his battles with a declining memory, brought on by a virus he contracted years ago, with his aged mother's descent into Alzheimer's disease."—New York Times Book Review
“Each of his chapters can be read as an essay. The book as a whole, however, paints a picture of a son’s renascence and mother’s demise, of transitions that are complex at best and made more difficult by diseases that are horrific in their courses and consequences.”—Chicago Tribune
"A World of Light [is] a nourishing meditation both meticulous and lyrical, a convergence familiar to anyone who has read Skloot's earlier memoir, essays and poems. He manages, through unsentimental observations captured in searingly precise language, to make his odd, precarious world glow with its 'singular strangeness'. . . . His is a world made beautiful by its changed prospects, even while it is frighteningly uncertain in its daily realities."—The Seattle Times
"[Skloot's] new collection of essays, A World of Light, and his latest collection of poems, Approximately Paradise [Tupelo Press], center on . . . betrayals of the mind. What the books reveal is transcendent understanding. His words move to a rhythm of ethereal design. . . . While reading Skloot, one longs to read it aloud to Marcel Proust, who surely would applaud and cry with us at the ways in which language touches our souls. . . . Skloot's music in these books moves in us with a truth that is achingly beautiful. These works are composed of the stuff of reality and undistilled emotion."—Dan Hays, Statesman Journal
“If anyone can write with empathy about a parent’s advancing dementia, it’s Oregon writer Floyd Skloot. . . . He delivers a clear-headed account full of warmth, insight and wit.”—Karen McCowan, Eugene Register-Guard
“Skloot’s personal situation may be achingly unique, but his guilty exasperation in these moments is the plight of Everyman with an aging parent overtaken by Alzheimer’s. It is this rare-yet-somehow-familiar paradox that makes Skloot’s writing so engrossing, and so lasting in its effect on the reader.”—Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett, Oregonian
“Skloot writes with polish…and with humor, and insight.”—Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database
“The essays are beautifully structured, moving seamlessly across decades.”—PopMatters.com
"A World of Light is an engaging, sobering, and inspiring book. By no means is it a light read, but its pages will prove rewarding to those interested in the mysteries of human memory and its decline. The literary gifts of the writer shine brightly through despite his post-encephalitic state. Tragedy is leavened with humor, and the reality of dementia comes to be accommodated with empathy and understanding. . . . Equally impressive is the courage of the author to write such a book, with its requisite immersion not only in his mother's dimentia but his own vexing cognitive challenges. Never indulging in self-pity, Skloot has presented a book well worth reading."—Neurology Today