Description
Book SynopsisThe moving story of an English professor studying neurology in order to understand and come to terms with her father's death from Alzheimer's. Winner of the Memoir Prize for Books by the Memoir MagazineIn 1985, when Cindy Weinstein was a graduate student at UC Berkeley, her beloved father, Jerry, was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease. He was fifty-eight years old. Twelve years later, at age seventy, he died having lost all of his memoriesalong with his ability to read, write, and speak. Finding the Right Words follows Weinstein's decades-long journey to come to terms with her father's dementia as both a daughter and an English professor. Although her lifelong love of language and literature gave her a way to talk about her grief, she realized that she also needed to learn more about the science of dementia to make sense of her father's death. To write her story, she collaborated with Dr. Bruce L. Miller, neurologist and director of the Memory and Aging Center at the Univ
Trade ReviewAn opportunity to reflect upon our shared humanity and the specific losses and loves that define us as individuals.
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Global Brain Health InstituteFinding the Right Words: A Story of Literature, Grief, and the Brain covers something that will touch everyone — death and senior moments.
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Pasadena WeeklyOf special interest to both academia and the non-specialist general reader on the subject of the medical condition known as Alzheimer's. Exceptionally well written, organized and presented, "Finding the Right Words: A Story of Literature, Grief, and the Brain" combines both the intensely personal and the universally applicable — making it especially and unreservedly recommended for personal, professional, community, college, and university library Psychology of Dementia collections and supplemental studies curriculum lists.
—Margaret Lane,
Midwest Book ReviewWorth reading.
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Portland Book ReviewTable of ContentsA Note to the Reader
Preface
Chapter 1: Diagnosis
Hitting the Fan
The Detective Story
Chapter 2: Word Finding
Call Me Ahab
Where Dementia Decides to Dance
Chapter 3: Space
Lost in Space
Two Kinds of Space
Chapter 4: Behavior
Turning Right
The Neglected and Poorly Understood
Chapter 5: Memory
In Memoriam: Jerry Weinstein
A Tragic Juxtaposition
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Glossary
Works Cited
Index
