Mirrored Lives: Aging Children and Elderly Parents
(NY: Praeger books, 1990)

"This book is an honest, moving account of 'the frustration of a family whose central member's life is progressively diminished by physical and mental impairment.' It chronicles the daily stresses of living with an aged, ill parent whose physical disabilities are heightened by loss of independence and self-esteem. The final chapter outlines a family plan for dealing with prolonged illness in an elderly relative. Beautifully written, this is one of the best first-person accounts of family caregiving. Highly recommended for both children and parents." Library Journal

"I found your book . . . almost unbearably concrete and candid. This made it painful to read but, of course, gives it its great value as an authentic document. It is a book which should be read by many people." Oliver Sacks, author: Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

"A disturbing description of Life in the twilight zone, and a useful adjunct to the volumes available on death and dying." Kirkus Reviews

"Mr. Koch has a reporter's eye for detail, an ability to bring a scene to life, and has done an impressive amount of research around the issues of caregiving, family relationships, and defining ourselves as we live with others over time. Clinical Gerontologist

Order Information

Available from Praeger Books, a division of Greenwood Publishing Group
Ordered through bookstores, or directly from the publisher (1-800-225-5800).

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Ethics in Everyday Places

In Ethics in Everyday Places, ethicist and geographer Tom Koch considers what happens when, as he puts it, “you do everything right but know you've done something wrong." The resulting moral stress and injury, he argues, are pervasive in modern Western society. Koch makes his argument "from the ground up," from the perspective of average persons, and through a revealing series of maps in which issues of ethics and morality are embedded.

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WICN Interview

CKNW Interview

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In Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground (University of Chicago Press, 2011) medical geographer Tom Koch makes a new, and important argument: It is in the mapping of individual cases of illness as group events that we have come to understand disease as a public thing affecting general populations. Maps become, in this telling, the workbench on which a collection of individual cases are combined to create a single health event, seen in place. It is thus in the mapping, and the environmental thinking that mapping promotes, that theories about this or that disease (and health in general) are first formulated and then tested.

New Republic Review

Haggett Review

CMAJ Published Review

Go To Tom Koch's Artist Page

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