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An essential book for those coping with Alzheimer's and other cognitive disorders that “reframe[s] our understanding of dementia with sensitivity and accuracy . . . to grant better futures to our loved ones and ourselves” (Parul Sehgal, The New York Times). An estimated fifty million people in the world suffer from dementia. Diseases such as Alzheimer's erase parts of one's memory but are also often said to erase the self. People don't simply die from such diseases; they are imagined, in the clichés of our era, as vanishing in plain sight, fading away, or enduring a long goodbye. In On Vanishing, Lynn Casteel Harper, a Baptist minister and nursing home chaplain, investigates the myths ...
"This memoir tells the story of a man's deterioration from Alzheimer disease from two perspectives. His daughter, an English professor at Caltech, describes her father's dementia, using her expertise in language and literature as a way to frame his loss of words, spatial orientation, identity, behavioral decorum, and memory. The physician, an academic neurologist at the University of California at San Francisco, explains the science behind Alzheimer disease using his expertise in neurology, articulating to a general audience how dementia assaults the brain"--
Surveys the online social habits of American teens and analyzes the role technology and social media plays in their lives, examining common misconceptions about such topics as identity, privacy, danger, and bullying.
Visions of Savage Paradise is the first major book-length study of seventeenth-century Dutch artist Albert Eckhout to be published in nearly seventy years. Eckhout, who was court painter to the colonial governor of Dutch Brazil, created life-size paintings of Amerindians, Africans, and Brazilians of mixed race in support of the governor’s project to document the people and natural history of the colony. In this study, Rebecca Parker Brienen provides a detailed analysis of Eckhout’s works, framing them with discussions of both their colonial context and contemporary artistic practices in the Dutch republic.
'A brave writer whose books open up fundamental questions about life and art' – Telegraph In this inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing makes a vivid and politically-engaged case for the importance of art – especially in the turbulent weather of the twenty-first century. We are often told art can’t change anything. In Funny Weather, Laing argues that it can. It changes how we see the world, it exposes inequality, and it offers fertile new ways of living. Across a diverse selection of essays, Laing profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keeffe, interviews Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. Written with originality and compassion, Funny Weather is a celebration of art as a force of resistance and repair – and as an antidote to a frightening political moment.
A MacArthur Genius Grant recipient pioneers a radical change in how we interact with older loved ones, especially those experiencing dementia, as she introduces a proven method that uses the creative arts to bring light and joy to the lives of elders. In Creative Care, Anne Basting lays the groundwork for a widespread transformation in our approach to elder care and uses compelling, touching stories to inspire and guide us all—family, friends, and health professionals—in how to connect and interact with those living with dementia. A MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, Basting tells the story of how she pioneered a radical change in how we interact with our older loved ones. Now used around...
'Bright Dead Things buoyed me in this dismal year. I'm thankful for this collection, for its wisdom and generosity, for its insistence on holding tight to beauty even as we face disintegration and destruction.' Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You A book of bravado and introspection, of feminist swagger and harrowing loss, Bright Dead Things considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact - tracing in intimate detail the ways the speaker's sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth and falls in love. In these extraordinary poems Ada Limón's heart becomes a 'huge beating genius machine' striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. 'I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,' the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O'Hara, Sharon Olds and Mark Doty, Limón's work is consistently generous, accessible, and 'effortlessly lyrical' (New York Times) - though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt and lived.
On autopsy, the brain of an Alzheimer's patient can weigh as little as 30 percent of a healthy brain. The tissue grows porous. It is a sieve through which the past slips. As her mother loses her grasp on their shared history, Elizabeth Kadetsky sifts through boxes of the snapshots, newspaper clippings, pamphlets, and notebooks that remain, hoping to uncover the memories that her mother is actively losing as her dementia progresses. These remnants offer the false yet beguiling suggestion that the past is easy to reconstruct—easy to hold. At turns lyrical, poignant, and alluring, The Memory Eaters tells the story of a family's cyclical and intergenerational incidents of trauma, secret-keeping, and forgetting in the context of 1970s and 1980s New York City. Moving from her parents' divorce to her mother's career as a Seventh Avenue fashion model and from her sister's addiction and homelessness to her own experiences with therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, Kadetsky takes readers on a spiraling trip through memory, consciousness fractured by addiction and dementia, and a compulsion for the past salved by nostalgia.
Using techniques of erasure, Metres seeks rhythm or language within the spare, bleak testimonies of those tortured at Abu Ghraib.
Challenges conventional perceptions about Alzheimer's disease to offer readers alternative approaches to memory loss and aging that can be aided through simple nutritional and exercise strategies.