Mastics-Moriches-Shirley Community Library Reader Advisory Blog: alzheimers

Looking for books featured on the morning news and talk shows? Here are a few titles recently in the media that are available at the Community Library (click the book covers or titles to place them on hold):

Slow Dancing With a Stranger: Lost and Found in the Age of Alzheimer's by Meryl Comer

Off the Sidelines: Raise Your Voice, Change the World by Kristen Gillibrand

Slow Dancing With a Stranger: Lost and Found in the Age of Alzheimer's by Meryl Comer:

From Emmy award-winning broadcast journalist and Alzheimer's advocate Meryl Comer comes a profoundly intimate and unflinching account of her husband's battle with Alzheimer's disease, one of today's most pressing and least-understood health epidemics.

Off the Sidelines: Raise Your Voice, Change the World by Kristen Gillibrand:

Kirsten Gillibrand, senator, wife, and mother of two, recounts her personal journey in public service and galvanizes women to reach beyond their busy lives and make a meaningful difference in the world around them in her new memoir Off the Sidelines.

The Hungry Girl Diet by Lisa Lillien:

The bestselling author of the Hungry Girl cookbooks now delivers the first-ever meal plan based on her super-sizing techniques, diet philosophies, and recipes, and she's put them into a four-week jump-start plan to help you lose weight.

Blue Mind by Wallace J. Nichols:

Discusses the importance of humans' connection to water and how people are drawn to being in, on, or around oceans, rivers, and lakes and points to recent findings in neuroscience that indicate that proximity to water can improve mood, performance, health, and success

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

Genre: Adult Non-Fiction
Rating: 5 out of 5

"Being Mortal is about the limitations of what modern medicine can provide for people as their lives draw to a close. Gawande argues that the objective of medicine should not merely be treatment and survival; medical care should also ensure dignity in death and having control over one's final moments. He argues that instead of aggressively fighting the inescapable realities of aging, we should ask the hard questions of ourselves and our loved ones -- What makes life worth living? When should we try to extend our lives, and when should we choose a better quality of our remaining days over extending their quantity?

This book is difficult to read. Not because of the way Gawande writes -- his style is highly engaging, and he never lapses into excessively scientific jargon or overly simplistic explanations -- but because of the tough subject matter. Gawande draws on his own experiences as a doctor and peppers his book with honest and humane stories of his patients, friends, and family; the stories he tells make the book more accessible, and also more heartbreaking. (And that's not a bad thing.)

No one likes to think about their loved ones', or their own, impending mortality. But it's important to have these hard conversations, because as Gawande says, "endings matter." - Amanda

Recently in the Media

Debut Released Today: Turn of Mind