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DEMENTIA REIMAGINED

BUILDING A LIFE OF JOY AND DIGNITY FROM BEGINNING TO END

A potent hybrid of medical history/journal and memoir.

A patient-focused perspective on two highly complex and stigmatized brain diseases.

In this effective demystification of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, physician and bioethicist Powell (Psychiatry and Bioethics/Albert Einstein Coll. of Medicine) reframes two debilitating cognitive disorders. She recounts her medical school years studying brain pathology, a field that has been drastically revised and improved over the decades, though definitive disease cures remain elusive. Her illuminating history of Alzheimer’s disease and its legacy of treatments and policies features the German psychiatrist who identified the malady and Solomon Fuller, a black pathologist who contributed groundbreaking brain-mapping dementia studies in the early 20th century. Deinstitutionalization and assisted living facility costs refocused government attention back onto mental illness and the elderly, rebranding it as a priority just as Ronald Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1994. Powell smoothly moves through the advent of palliative drugs and the much-argued hypotheses of amyloid plaque accumulation as well as the debate over preventative PET scans. There is progress being made, she observes, and optimistic statistics show the numbers of older people with dementia decreasing, yet the stakes and costs remain high to find a cure. Powell profiles a geriatrician who discusses the ethical, emotional, and financial dilemmas facing loved ones of dementia patients, and she looks at the caregiving decisions that plague families. As someone who regularly participates in research studies, the author holds a great personal (and congenital) stake in her subject matter. Her “medical training,” she writes, “never prepared me to address the challenges of dementia that I faced as a daughter and granddaughter,” and her warm advice to readers on effective dementia care is useful and proactively delivered. In a touching conclusion, Powell discusses her imagined requests at the final stages of her life when feeding tubes and emergency room visits are forbidden in favor of daily pain management. Throughout this insightful book, the author addresses the issues facing dementia victims and their caregivers with the kind of compassion and dignity everyone deserves at the end of life.

A potent hybrid of medical history/journal and memoir.

Pub Date: April 2, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-7352-1090-5

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Avery

Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019

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THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...

A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.

The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.

Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1

Page Count: 512

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011

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THE LAWS OF HUMAN NATURE

The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.

A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.

Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”

The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.

Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5

Page Count: 580

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018

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