The Forgetting: Understanding Alzheimer's: A Biography of a Disease

David Shenk

ISBN 10: 0002571749 / ISBN 13: 9780002571746

Published by HarperCollins, 2002

About this Item

A very good clean copy with no inscriptions in a very good complete dust jacket. Seller Inventory # 001230971

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Forgetting: Understanding Alzheimer's: A...

Publisher: HarperCollins

Publication Date: 2002

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Very Good

Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis:

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

A powerfully engaging, scrupulously researched, and deeply empathetic narrative of the history of Alzheimer’s disease, how it affects us, and the search for a cure.

Afflicting nearly half of all people over the age of 85, Alzheimer’s disease kills nearly 100,000 Americans a year as it insidiously robs them of their memory and wreaks havoc on the lives of their loved ones. It was once minimized and misunderstood as forgetfulness in the elderly, but Alzheimer’s is now at the forefront of many medical and scientific agendas, for as the world’s population ages, the disease will touch the lives of virtually everyone. David Shenk movingly captures the disease’s impact on its victims and their families, and he looks back through history, explaining how Alzheimer’s most likely afflicted such figures as Jonathan Swift, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Willem de Kooning. The result is a searing and graceful account of Alzheimer’s disease, offering a sobering, compassionate, and ultimately encouraging portrait.

Review:

First attracted to his subject by its horrific ability to destroy the human mind and body, journalist David Shenk ultimately finds reasons to accept Alzheimer's disease--and almost forgive it--in The Forgetting. Shenk describes his work as a biography, the life story of a biological outlaw that sends victims "on a slow but certain trajectory toward forgetting and death." But his illuminating portrait of this growing epidemic offers more than a basic chronology. Shenk begins with the disease's christening in 1906, when German physician Alois Alzheimer discovered mysterious tangles and plaques in the brain of a dead woman who in life had suffered severe memory loss and dementia. The tale unfolds to reveal a host of intriguing players: struggling scientists (the clever, the bullheaded, and the pharmaceutically endowed), politicians divided by opposing priorities, exhausted caregivers, and patients whose biological clocks virtually tick backward over an average eight-year period. It includes impossible twists: longer life expectancies and successful treatments for other diseases mean more cases of Alzheimer's will inevitably occur. Shenk's graceful synthesis of personal accounts (from Plato to Reagan) with a century-long search for answers and cures leads him to an impressive conclusion. Perhaps Alzheimer's disease is much like winter: "Once it is gone, we'll face less hardship, but we'll also have lost an important lens on life." --Liane Thomas