Afflicting nearly half of all persons over the age of 85, Alzheimer's disease kills nearly 100,000 Americas 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 kill millions more and touch the lives of virtually everyone.
The Forgetting is a scrupulously researched, multilayered analysis of Alzheimer's and its social, medical, and spiritual implications. David Shenk presents us with much more than a detailed explanation of its causes and effects and the search for a cure. He 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 William de Kooning. The result is a searing, powerfully engaging account of Alzheimer's disease, offering a grim but sympathetic and ultimately encouraging portrait.

Reviews

With grace and precision, Shenk (Data Song), a journalist and occasional NPR commentator, presents a lyric biography of Alzheimer's, "a condition specific to humans and as old as humanity." At one time, doctors thought senility, or dementia, was an inevitable fact of growing older. Now they know that Alzheimer's is a specific, formidable disease that threatens to reach epidemic proportions within the next 50 years. The disease is named for the neurologist who, in 1906, first noticed, in the brain of an autopsied patient, the telltale plaques and tangles that strangle the brain's neurons. Shenk presents a thoughtful and complex rumination on many aspects of Alzheimer's, including anecdotes about the memory loss experienced by Ronald Reagan, Ralph Waldo Emerson and E.B. White. He recounts the tales of caregivers, many of whom become clinically depressed and who, along with physicians, draw an analogy between the developing skills of a child and the decrease in cognitive ability that besets Alzheimer's patients. The author delves deeply into scientific research and explains that though there is as yet no cure, a recently developed vaccine holds great promise for the future. However, he warns, scientific inquiry could be impeded by fierce competition for research dollars. Doctors can now recognize an early stage of "probable Alzheimer's," which means that patients who are slowly sinking into its depths can understand their condition and its destructive path. Shenk movingly recounts a conversation he had with one such patient, who shares interesting ideas for rehabilitative conditioning to slow down his mental deterioration. Agent, Sloan Harris. (On-sale: Sept. 4) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

The price humans pay for increased longevity is a greater likelihood of developing degenerative diseases. Among the most devastating is Alzheimer's, predicted to reach epidemic proportions by midcentury. Journalist Shenk's "biography" of Alzheimer's disease explores the nature of the baffling plaques and tangles, discovered by Alois Alzheimer in 1907, that eventually consume the brains of victims, erasing a lifetime of memories. Notable sufferers whose stories Shenk tells here include Ronald Regan, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Willem de Kooning; there are also personal accounts from the less famous he met in Internet chatrooms. Shenk also chronicles tales of driven researchers, hellbent to be the first to unlock the disease's secrets and the riches to be made by drug manufacturers hungry for a moneymaking cure. His engrossing book draws on an amazing array of scientific, historical, ethical, religious, mythological, literary, and artistic sources and is filled with fascinating characters and first-rate explanations of the science behind the disease. (His technical discussion of memory and other aspects of the disease is much clearer than Charles Pierce's in Hard To Forget, LJ 4/15/00.) A unique and welcome addition to any scientific, aging, or Alzheimer's collection. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/01.] Karen McNally Bensing, Benjamin Rose Inst. Lib., Cleveland Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

"Riveting . . . Superb . . . A wonderfully readable history of the brain and of memory." -"San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
""A remarkable addition to the literature of the science of the mind . . . Shenk has drawn together threads of neurobiology, art history, and psychology into a literary portrait of Alzheimer's disease perfectly balanced between sorrow and wonder, devastation and awe." -"Los Angeles Times Book Review"
"An elegant new book . . . Shenk rises above the usual rhetoric of combat and cure, enabling us to confront Alzheimer's not as an alien pestilence but as part of the human condition." -"Newsweek"
"Written with a researcher's attention to detail and a storyteller's ear." -"The New York Times Book Review"
"Destined to be a classic . . . Shenk's guided tour is free of medical jargon, filled instead with clear and sometimes memorable phrasing." -"The Seattle Times
""A fascinating meditation . . . Shenk has found something beautiful an