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Home > Body, Mind & Spirit > General Health > The Forgetting-eBook

The Forgetting

Shenk, David

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The Forgetting

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. Since 1975, the number of Americans afflicted has risen from five hundred thousand to five million; over the next fifty years, an estimated eighty to one hundred million more people worldwide will succumb to it. But it is the story behind these numbers that makes The Forgetting such a landmark work. A magnificent synthesis of history, science, politics, psychology ,and profound human drama, the book explores the nature of a disease that attacks not merely memory but the very core of our human identity.

Delving into such diverse areas as art history, literature, genetics, and neurobiology, David Shenk shows that Alzheimer's particular terror, the gradual eradication of memory and of mind is as old as humankind itself. He convincingly posits that such historical figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jonathan Swift and Frederick Law Olmstead were caught in the disease's insidious grip. Moving portraits of contemporary patients, their families, and their caregivers drive home the sad pattern of regression Alzheimer's exacts, a pathology that eerily mirrors child development in reverse. Yet Shenk offers a well of empathy and understanding for families striving to better understand and come to terms with their loss.

With equal mastery Shenk charts the complicated race to find a cure. As scientists pursue a treatment worth billions of dollars, the brutal competition among them poses a serious threat to the traditional ethic of sharing vital research. But there are heartening signs of progress, and for the first time there is excitement among scientists that a cure may indeed be possible.

Shenk eloquently calls Alzheimer's "death by a thousand subtractions." The Forgetting is at once a powerful examination of what this means and a forthright discussion of the impact this epidemic will have on the life of every reader.

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Title of ebook: The Forgetting
ISBN: 9781400075584
Publisher: Anchor
Internet download file size: 538 kb
Released online for download: 05-19-1999
Author of eBook: Shenk, David

The Forgetting

Alzheimer's: Portrait of an Epidemic
Chapter 1

I Have Lost Myself

A healthy, mature human brain is roughly the size and shape of two adult fists, closed and pressed together at the knuckles. Weighing three pounds, it consists mainly of about a hundred billion nerve cells--neurons--linked to one another in about one hundred trillion separate pathways. It is by far the most complicated system known to exist in nature or civilization, a control center for the coordination of breathing, swallowing, pressure, pain, fear, arousal, sensory perception, muscular movement, abstract thought, identity, mood, and a varied suite of memories in a symphony that is partly predetermined and partly adaptable on the fly. The brain is so ridiculously complex, in fact, that in considering it in any depth one can only reasonably wonder why it works so well so much of the time.

Mostly, we don't think about it at all. We simply take this nearly silent, ludicrously powerful electrochemical engine for granted. We feed it, try not to smash it too hard against walls or windshields, and let it work its magic for us.

Only when it begins to fail in some wa ... read full excerpt from The Forgetting ebook