This is the classic text on Alzheimer’s. It’s almost a decade old, but reads like it was written yesterday. Shenk tells us how the disease was discovered, how it develops in the brain and how it plays out in the daily lives of patients.

I read this within a month of my father’s diagnosis of advanced second stage dementia, and I’ve never been so comforted by a book. Even now, a few years later, I occasionally take “The Forgetting” down from the shelf and hold it. I read a few pages. I feel secure with it, I’m in the hands of a skilled, trustworthy and empathic writer.

Reading the book the first time, I was electrified to recognize in my father almost every symptom Shenk described. At the same time I was soothed, because I understood that it wasn’t my father who was so bizarre, it was the disease playing out in his hippocampus, amygdala and temporal lobes. To me it was a relief to know that his brain was going bad in an entirely common way: that he was not, if you will, a strange human being, but entirely normal for a patient with Alzheimer’s.

David Shenk is the ideal journalist, sympathetic without the least hint of sentimentality. His prose is perfectly crafted, never an awkward sentence, with a perfect balance of exposition and narrative. That is, he gives us technical explanations about the disease, but we’re never far from the stories of a lively set of characters. We hear about Frau Auguste D., the original dementia patient of Alois Alzheimer, and Ronald Reagan, and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Jonathan Swift, two writers who suffered extreme memory loss and the inability to make sense of even the words they’d written themself. It’s a richly peopled world, and Shenk makes it clear that this is a timeless disease, one that has been with us always.

I was surprised by the Acknowledgments section of the book, which goes on for three full pages and names a hundred people. You can see there how much research went into the book. But while reading it, I felt as if Shenk had sat down and typed it out without the least effort. Like a great athlete, he makes the job look effortless.

It’s obvious that the author is intensely involved in his topic and he manages to convey his feelings to his audience. But the book wanders around, is often redundant, can’t seem to decide what its basic premise is. There are several separate stories about famous people in history who had AD (Emerson, the artist deKoonig, Reagan, etc.) It is touching to hear their stories but I don’t know what the 19-th century scholar Emerson has to tell us about a modern “epidemic.” In at least one place the author gets bogged down in the personal battles for credit between researchers instead of focusing on the research. His points at the end about the downsides of curing the disease (something to do with losing the insight about life that comes from watching memory loss, I think =–!!) are shortsighted and close to unintentionally offensive.

Finally, people might think from the title that the rate of Alzheimer’s is increasing. This is not actually what the author proposes, only that because there are more old people there is more Alzheimer’s. There is nothing in the book to support the idea of an “epidemic,” an increase in the chance of getting the disease should one live to old age.

The losing of one’s memory, arguably the essence of the person, is one of the most distressing disease processes to contemplate, making Alzheimer’s a name that brings with it stigma and fear.

Shenk gives a uniquely humane coverage of the condition, in a book that is devoid of harsh clinical language. He explains concepts such as the multifactorial causes of the disease with a pleasant use of analogy. A roughly chronological account of both the natural history of the disease and the history of scientic study of Alzheimers allows the book to evolve naturally and gives it a structure that is often not found in lesser disease-orientated books.

Cases, both of anonymous families and famous victims of the disease, are woven into the narrative in a wholly sympathetic manner.

Shenk offers us helpful ways of seeing the degeneration of the disease in a mirror held up to childhood development which may help some people to break through their fear and disgust.

This gentle book holds much of value for victims, families and carers as well as for students of health related subjects.