Still Alice in Around the Year in 52 Books

Apr 26, 2013 Book Concierge rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: own, psychology, literary-fiction, favorite, love, contemporary-fiction, family, medicine, library, concierge

Book on CD read by the author.
5***** and a ❤

Alice Howland, Ph.D., professor of Psychology and Linguistics at Harvard University, wife and mother, begins to notice that she is forgetting things. No, not just where she put her keys, but words and thoughts and directions. Still, when she’s diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease she is stunned.

The brilliance of Genova’s book is that she writes from Alice’s perspective. The reader experiences the slow decline as one daily function after anot Book on CD read by the author.
5***** and a ❤

Alice Howland, Ph.D., professor of Psychology and Linguistics at Harvard University, wife and mother, begins to notice that she is forgetting things. No, not just where she put her keys, but words and thoughts and directions. Still, when she’s diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease she is stunned.

The brilliance of Genova’s book is that she writes from Alice’s perspective. The reader experiences the slow decline as one daily function after another becomes challenging, difficult and even impossible to perform. The last third of the book is particularly poignant.

I had a very hard time with this book. My mother is in the final stages of this terrible disease. She is no longer mobile. She cannot speak and does not recognize any of her family or friends. She is just a physical shell of a person, the woman she was either locked away or perhaps completely lost to us and to herself.

Several years ago my brothers and I arranged a celebration for our parents’ 60th wedding anniversary at the assisted living facility where they then lived. Mother was still mobile and speaking (though not making much sense). She enjoyed the music and the food and the celebration. Several of her long-time friends came. One, Maria, approached me when she arrived and asked if my mother still recognized me. I said yes – but I realized suddenly that this was the first visit where she had failed to call me by the pet name she’d always used for me. Just before Maria left the party, she came up to me again and said, “Your mother recognizes love.” I took a wonderful picture of Maria and my mother at that gathering, and last year when Maria published her memoir she included that photo in her book along with several pages describing what my Mother meant to her and other young women in the community. Yes, my mother recognizes love, and I am especially glad that so many other people recognize HER love for them.

One final word about the audio version of this book. Had I been rating this based on the audio performance I would have given it only 3-stars. How I wish a professional voice-over artist had been hired to do the reading! Genova clearly believes strongly in the work and the message, but she reads with the same inflection throughout. So it is difficult to follow conversations at times because the listener cannot effectively tell which character is speaking. This is especially true early in the book when Alice isn’t so severely impaired, and her use of language matches the other speakers.

UPDATE 12Aug13
Reread this book in one day, in preparation for my F2F book club meeting. I got as much if not more out of it on this second reading. ...more

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Jan 19, 2013 Robyn rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

A fast read--in a good way! I thought this book had a great flow to it. I just kept reading and reading, and suddenly it was over.
I loved how the author chose to tell us Alice's story through Alice, despite her not being "the most reliable source of what's going on". Sad as it was, watching Alice deteriorate was intriguing but also wildly insightful. As the reader, you could really see how Alice's life really changed with the diagnosis and how Alzheimer's Disease really affects some of the thing ...more

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May 02, 2010 Lauren rated it really liked it

I really wish goodreads allowed you to do half stars. This was one of those books that I kept meaning to read and it never got read. I'm glad I finally picked it up though.
The story opens your eyes about dementia and Alzheimer's disease. I found myself feeling really sorry for Alice and not liking John her husband as a person but ultimately I also felt sorry for him as well. At times though I didn't feel like I was reading a novel. Sometimes I felt like I was more learning about the disease its ...more

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Mar 19, 2013 Mary Anne rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 5-stars, 2013-read

I just finished this and I can't stop thinking about it. I don't think I have ever cried so much with a book. I feel restless right, wanting others to read it so they can know how I feel about the book and how scary early onset Alzheimer's or any form if the disease is. I can't imagine losing all parts of yourself. ...more

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Feb 25, 2011 Andrea rated it liked it

Shelves: 2011

I thought this book would be depressing, but it only sort of was, and not in the way I expected. I actully thought it seemed kind of nice the way her kids treated her at the end of the book. It makes me think that if she didn't have such nice kids, or no kids at all, then it would be really depressing.
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