No Time Like the Future An Optimist Considers Mortality
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INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A moving account of resilience, hope, fear and mortality, and how these things resonate in our lives, by actor and advocate Michael J. Fox. The entire world knows Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly, the teenage sidekick of Doc Brown in Back to the Future; as Alex P. Keaton in Family Ties; as Mike Flaherty in Spin City; and through numerous other movie roles and guest appearances on shows such as The Good Wife and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Diagnosed at age 29, Michael is equally engaged in Parkinson’s advocacy work, raising global awareness of the disease and helping find a cure through The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, the world’s leading non-profit funder of PD science. His two previous bestselling memoirs, Lucky Man and Always Looking Up, dealt with how he came to terms with the illness, all the while exhibiting his iconic optimism. His new memoir reassesses this outlook, as events in the past decade presented additional challenges. In No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality, Michael shares personal stories and observations about illness and health, aging, the strength of family and friends, and how our perceptions about time affect the way we approach mortality. Thoughtful and moving, but with Fox’s trademark sense of humor, his book provides a vehicle for reflection about our lives, our loves, and our losses. Running through the narrative is the drama of the medical madness Fox recently experienced, that included his daily negotiations with the Parkinson’s disease he’s had since 1991, and a spinal cord issue that necessitated immediate surgery. His challenge to learn how to walk again, only to suffer a devastating fall, nearly caused him to ditch his trademark optimism and “get out of the lemonade business altogether.” Does he make it all of the way back? Read the book.
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Not a particular fan of Michael J. Fox but heard/saw good reviews about this book. I really enjoyed it. I guess he's written several memoirs but this is the first where he has let is guard down, faced even more challenges as he aged, and “considers mortality”. A good book about a good human being. Especially in this year of Covid, it is a worthy book to read.
As a chronically ill and disabled person, and as a fan, I am so disappointed. There's just so much complaining—an entire chapter devoted to his love/hate relationship with golf, plus more wry grousing about it elsewhere, complaining about things in his movies (cool scene but they unfortunately used “Walking On Sunshine”), complaining about being sick to the nth degree, and more. There's discussing your negative feelings about your symptoms, and about the before and after of being disabled, and then there is complaining.
Five chapters in, and kinda getting the impression that Michael thinks he and his people are awesome, and everything and everyone else needs some work. I didn't want to know that.
I wish I could give it more, but it just simply didn't leave me with anything (maybe except for one of the last points in the book where he talks about his career that has ended or the family house they sold, that they don't owe him anything. They have offered more that he could've asked for and that chapter is now over and you just have to be grateful and accept it).
He has had some of the best first 30 years of anyone's life, followed by some of the worst 30 years, he's managed to keep his wits and sense of humour and he's been blessed by having such a loving and supportive family.
I've enjoyed his acting in The Good Wife most of all, he's simply phenomenal there, but at the same time he remains one of the main characters ever played in time traveling movies.
I wish I would have some remarkable insight after reading the book, but I realise now that maybe that's what's remarkable about his memoir and his life: he's managed to find some sort of happiness in the little things, in all the things most of us take for granted. Too bad it was a disease like this that taught him this lesson.
