Volume 49, Number 14 · September 26, 2002
Heart of Darkness
By Sue M. Halpern
The Forgetting: Alzheimer's, Portrait of an Epidemic
by David Shenk
Doubleday, 290 pp., $24.95
The Memory Bible: An Innovative Strategy for Keeping Your Brain Young
by Gary Small, M.D.
Hyperion, 305 pp., $25.95
A User's Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain
by John J. Ratey, M.D.
Vintage, 404 pp., $14.95 (paper)
The Aging Brain
by Lawrence Whalley
Columbia University Press,182 pp., $22.95
Losing My Mind: An Intimate Look at Life with Alzheimer's
by Thomas DeBaggio
Free Press, 207 pp., $24.00
When David Shenk set out to write his intelligent and unusually circumspect book The Forgetting, he had, he said, two ambitions: to write a 'biography' of Alzheimer's disease, and to chronicle the race for its cure. A biography of a disease is a strange nomenclature. It suggests, at the start, that Alzheimer's has a life of its own, one that is distinct from its victims'. Alzheimer's doesn't have its own life, except in this: it is animated by fear. A nationwide poll conducted this spring for the Alzheimer's Association by Peter D. Hart Research Associates found 95 percent of all respondents saying that Alzheimer's was a 'serious problem facing the nation,' and well more than half—64 percent—of those between 35 and 49 years of age reporting that they were concerned about getting the disease themselves. Four million Americans already have Alzheimer's, a number that is expected to grow to fourteen million by midcentury. As Gary Small, the director of UCLA's Center on Aging, says in his bullish manual for beating the odds, The Memory Bible: An Innovative Strategy for Keeping Your Brain Young, 'we are all one day closer to Alzheimer's disease.'
Review, 4221 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |