Authors: David Shenk
ISBN-13: 9780385498388, ISBN-10: 0385498381
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Date Published: January 2003
Edition: First Anchor Paperback Edition
DAVID SHENK is a national-bestselling author of four previous books, including The Forgetting and Data Smog, and a contributor to National Geographic, Gourmet, Harper’s, The New Yorker, NPR, and PBS. The Forgetting was hailed by John Bayley as “the definitive work on Alzheimer’s,” and subsequently inspired an Emmy Award–winning PBS film of the same name. Shenk frequently lectures on issues of health, aging, and technology, and has advised the President’s Council on Bioethics.
An urgent and moving exploration of the Alzheimer's epidemic, The Forgetting is a dazzling meditation on the nature of memory and self and on the disease that robs people of both.
Alzheimer's disease is a demographic time bomb.
According to Shenk, Alzheimer's disease is reaching epidemic proportions and could affect as many as 15 million Americans by the year 2050. Over the next fifty years, some 80 to 100 million people worldwide may succumb to it. Shenk's compelling book traces the history of Alzheimer's from its first diagnosis in 1901, and it chronicles the latest scientific discoveries that may eventually lead to its cure. The author includes the stories of not only Alzheimer's patients but also the families and caregivers whose lives have been affected, sometimes devastated, by it. Along the way, Shenk mentions a number of famous figures, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ronald Reagan, who have been victimized by the debilitating affliction. But The Forgetting is more than a record of Alzheimer's; it is an interesting study of how scientists are feverishly working and sometimes battling one another to find a cure.
Mike Shea
Prologue | 1 | |
Pt. I | Early Stage | |
1 | I Have Lost Myself | 11 |
2 | Bothered | 28 |
3 | The God Who Forgot and the Man Who Could Not | 44 |
4 | The Race | 62 |
5 | Irrespective of Age | 72 |
6 | A Most Loving Brother | 86 |
Pt. II | Middle Stage | |
7 | Fumbling for the Name of My Wife | 101 |
8 | Back to Birth | 112 |
9 | National Institute of Alzheimer's | 132 |
10 | Ten Thousand Feet, at Ten O'Clock at Night | 148 |
11 | A World of Struldbruggs | 162 |
12 | Humanize the Mouse | 178 |
13 | We Hope to Radio Back to Earth Images of Beauty Never Seen | 192 |
Pt. III | End Stage | |
14 | Breakthrough? | 209 |
15 | One Thousand Subtractions | 216 |
16 | Things to Avoid | 228 |
17 | The Mice Are Smarter | 242 |
Epilogue | 253 | |
Acknowledgments | 257 | |
Resources for Patients and Families | 261 | |
Sources | 265 | |
Index | 281 |