Carved In Sand: When Attention Fails and Memory Fades in Midlife
Cathryn Jakobson Ramin
“I have a close friend who is the same age I am who began showing signs of dementia or Alzheimer's in her late 50's. I also have a sister with multiple sclerosis, and she has experienced serious cognitive impairment as a result. This has brought home to me a certain fragility of our cognitive skills. The author is also very appealing. She's very witty, charming, intelligent, courageous.
She was — she doesn't tell in the book exactly how old she is, but she said she had only barely crossed the threshold of middle age when suddenly, something was very, very wrong. She was forgetting things — and she was a journalist who managed mul — complex projects. Suddenly, she was forgetting things, she needed to have notes anytime she went anywhere to speak, so being the investigative journalist she is, she decided to take on this issue as a job of reporting.
There are many, many, many people engaging in research about how to keep the brain alive. Meanwhile, of course, she has to just go from clinic to clinic to clinic searching for an answer to her own problem. She aims the book towards and intelligent layman who really doesn't know very much about the brain, so she explains research and therapy and different parts of the brain and how different parts of the brain control different kinds of cognitive functioning.
She does an excellent job of explaining these concepts to a person like me who hasn't had a neurology course ever in my life. Definitely a five.”
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