Still Alice in Play Book Tag

Sep 19, 2011 Anita Pomerantz rated it really liked it

Shelves: f2f-book-club

Linda recommended this book for my face to face book club, and I think it was a great recommendation. The book was written from the standpoint of Alice, a renowned professor at Harvard. Each chapter is a month in Alice's life. Unfortunately, Alice has early onset Alzheimer's disease. The book basically postulates what might go on in the mind of someone who has this disease as time passes.

To really get in Alice's mind and to stay there, all the while keeping the pace of the story moving and suspe ...more

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

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

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 01, 2016 Kristel rated it it was amazing

Shelves: audio

This was a heart wrenching story of what life with Alzheimer's can be. I think the author did an excellent job of showing this through the story of Alice. ...more

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Apr 08, 2010 Rachel N. rated it really liked it

The story of Alice Howland who at age fifty is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimers disease. Alice is a professor at Harvard in linguistics when she recieves the news. It was interesting reading a book written solely from the point of view of someone with Alzheimers. I think Lisa Genova does a good job of letting the reader experience Alice's confusion from the disease. The only problem I have with the book is that it made me really depressed. Alzheimers is such a horrible disease and I hope so ...more

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