Under this severity, nobody with brain damage is a person, and Alzheimer's, so often misreferred to as a mental illness, involves a catastrophic form of brain damage.
Materialists would contend that there is no soul, that we are only a kind of organic machine, our notion of a unique self misguided. It's difficult not to be convinced by this idea, seeing Nancy's selfhood warp and flicker and wane as the disease colonizes her. It's not good - not even for privileged bystanders, counting their blessings - to see a self under attack. We prefer to think of our selves as something original in the world, inviolate, in de pen dent of our physical bodies. The idea that we are biochemistry, and that's all, that thoughts and feelings are produced by neurons, that neurons can die and our selves die with them . . . that's a deeply undermining idea. It's far more comforting to contend that Nancy's soul, her essential self, remains intact beyond the reach of her struggle to think and express herself, and will be liberated and restored by immortality. I try hard to believe this when I see her, alone in the dayroom in the nursing home, sitting rubbing her hands together and muttering. I can't help wondering what she's thinking. Is she thinking? Is she having a dialogue with her disease, negotiating with it in some way, aware of the great buried store of memory, her past, her self, glimpsed under the tangles of Alzheimer's like a ruined house under the suffocating grip of ivy?
Now that she's at one remove from us again, it's easy to love her, and where love falters, guilt is primed and ready to fill its place.
A bold, mesmerizing novel about the woman known as "Typhoid Mary," the first known healthy carrier of typhoid fever in the burgeoning metropolis of early twentieth century New York.
Z, the novel about the life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is at points charming and; like another reviewer, I kept thinking of the movie, "Midnight...
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Although heavy on the scientific details, which slowed down the story for me (OK, I admit, I was one of those liberal arts majors who skipped out on...
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Loved this book. Magical, quirky, enchanting I could go on. All books do not have to be literary fiction, sometimes it is just so comforting to read...
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British Parliament asks Amazon to clarify why it pays $9 million in income tax on $23 billion of UK sales.(May 20 2013) Amazon will be called back to give further evidence to members of the British Parliament "to clarify how its activities in the U.K. justify its low corporate...
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