Customer Reviews

Hard to Forget: An Alzheimer's Story

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My mother in law is in the early stages of a progressive dementia (vascular dementia) whose symptoms are the same as Alzheimers. Alzheimers is the most well known of the forms of dementia but all are equally devastating to the individuals and their families.

I found Pierce's book hard to put down. Since I live with a person afflicted with symptoms so similar to those he describes, the reading of his narrative became completely absorbing. His strategy of combining historical perspective and scientific background with personal stories and experiences seemed to me to fill in, in a very useful way, where some of the more clinical, or the more purely personal, accounts leave one still wondering and curious about the impact of KNOWING about the disease on family members and on sufferers. Not all family members want to know as much as others about the disease and its implications. And, of course, those afflicted with dementia may or may not ever have a true moment of realization of the fact of their affliction.

The account Pierce gives of how his family member is able, at an early stage, to recognize what is happening to him, and way Pierce describes the last interaction in which they communicated and meaningful messages got through is especially affecting.

I have also found helpful, for day to day living with dementia, The 36-Hour Day, which is out in a newer edition now. But Pierce's book has something else to offer, and truly evokes the tragic mysteriousness of how we actually lose people before our eyes, while they, unaware, become increasingly hard to care for.

Who should buy this book:

-- Those who have a family member with Alzheimer's Disease. -- Friends of those families. -- Health-care providers. -- Fans of the nationally-known sportswriter Charles Pierce, because the prose in his first book (his work has been included in many sportswriting anthologies) is just as wonderful as it is on the sports pages.

Hard To Forget is the story of a young family -- Charles Pierce, his wife Margaret Doris,their new baby Brendan, and Margaret's son Abraham -- how they came to grips with the family denial of Pierce's father's Alzheimer's Disease. In 1985, Pierce's father John went to place flowers on the family graves in Worcester, Massachusetts, and vanished. He was found three days later in Vermont. When Charles and Margaret went to fetch him, John didn't recognize his son: "I think I'm going to give him that car," he told Margaret.

Charles Pierce's mother denied that anything was particularly the matter with her husband. Margaret, his wife, assumed the role of caretaker for her in-laws, trying to deal with the day-to-day issues and to convince her mother-in-law of the reality of the situation. Abraham, her son, found something new to dread in childhood: Sunday visits to Grandma and Grampa Pierce, and the fight in the car on the way home. Charles noticed not only his father's symptoms, but his uncles' and aunt's, and began researching the disease and its tendency to run in families. Would he get Alzheimer's? Would his new baby boy? Should he be tested? What did it mean when he couldn't find his parked car?

Pierce weaves together his family's story with a readable history of Alzheimer's Disease and the current, and sometimes conflicting, research. He reports on the studies done on the Amish and on a group of nuns. He retrieves horseshoes for the Friday Group, a gathering of Alzheimer's paitents in North Carolina. He recites to himself the trivia he hasn't forgotten, to prove to himself that everything is all right.

Fans of Pierce's sportswriting (he currently writes for Esquire; when he was writing for GQ, he published a much-talked-about story that ripped the facade of sainthood off Tiger Woods) will find Pierce's humor intact, along with an unflinching look at the tragedy that invaded his family's life. NPR fans who have heard him on the radio, in "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" and "It's Only a Game," will value having Pierce in print. Caretakers will want to refer this book to families who are being torn apart by Alzheimer's Disease, because the Pierces have been there and back again.

I had to search hard to find this book, because other "Charles Pierces" kept coming up online and it was hidden in "aging" or "disease, listed alphabetically" in the bookstores, but I recommend you persevere -- it was worth it. Somehow the author manages to combine a poignant memoir, exploring the way we're taught in our families of origin to deal (or not deal, in the case of the Pierces) with serious issues, with a highly readable account of what doctors know and are racing to find out about this cruel disease. On Saturdays, I often listen to Pierce on the NPR shows "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" and "Only a Game," and he is very funny. Some of that humor, although darker, leavens this book, which also gives an amazingly understandable summary of what scientists know about Alzheimer's and possible treatments. I hope people will read the excerpt here (or in Yankee magazine) and give this book a chance, even if they don't personally know someone with Alzheimer's. With all of us Baby Boomers aging faster than we care to admit, there are expected (according to last week's cover story in Time magazine) to be many, many new cases that eventually will touch most of us. Alzheimer's disease is depressing, but this beautifully written book is not. Highly recommended.

Fortunately, my family has no history of Alzheimer's disease. My only experience with the disease came from my next door neighbor. An elderly couple moved into the house next store to my family home when I was only 3 years old. The couple became my third set of grandparents. The husband, Howard, died about three years later. His wife began to suffer from Alzheimer's shortly after his death. I remember being very confused when she asked me to fetch her sweater that was upstairs on the sewing machine, when she lived in a one story home. My mother tried to explain her condition to me, but I did not understand how she could not know there was not a second floor in the house she had been in for about 5 years. Her family decided to put her into a nursing home because of an injury she sustained in a fall. She died before the Alzheimer's got worse. Since I never had to deal with anyone suffering from Alzheimer's after my neighbor died, I never learned about the disease. I picked up "Hard To Forget: An Alzheimer's Story" to learn about the disease, and what happened to my third grandmother. I found the book very informative and interesting to read. Pierce wonderfully blends together the history of the disorder and his own family's experiences. I managed to finish the book in one sitting because of Pierce's captivating style. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about Alzheimer's disease, or anyone who is looking for an enjoyable and informative read.

As an Alzheimer's family member, I read "Hard to Forget" with great interest. When my mother was diagnosed 13 years ago, my family went through stages of initial denial and then finally accepting the diagnosis and then coping as best we could...a similar story to the Pierce family - and to so many other families. The difference is that my mother was not an "early onset" patient. Hers is probably not the "familial" Alzheimer's Disease. And the terror is not as great for my sister and I as it is for Charles Pierce. But it is still there.

The author has a wonderful way of describing the emotional toll of the disease but also of shining a light on the heroism of caretakers like his wife Margaret. I've seen the devotion of wives, husbands, children and grandchildren as they pay weekly and sometimes daily visits to their loved ones in the nursing home. The visits go on for years. They watch as their loved one slips away. But it helps to know that you are not alone in this difficult journey. "Hard to Forget" will help all the families who are coping and who are waiting for a cure.

Pierce's instinct is to tell a story. He sets a scene, he gives us characters and conflict and dialogue, and makes reading about dementia an adventure. He begins one story, "The man made it all the way across the country, and nobody asked him why he was still in his pajamas." He opens the story of Frau Auguste D, the famous patient of Alois Alzheimer, by writing, "Something had to be done with the woman. She was screaming in the streets." Immediately, although I already know about Frau Auguste D., I want to hear her story again, and in detail.

From the early pages of the book--where we learn that the author's father was born in 1915, the same year Alois Alzheimer died--it's clear that the Pierce will interweave his own story with a history of the disease and the scientists struggling to understand and treat it. The science is presented dramatically--and underlying these sections, adding to their power, we are told the story of the author's father and his siblings. Pierce writes of his grandmother: "Mary Ellen Pierce had had five children, and all five of them would develop Alzheimer's disease. All four of her sons would disappear and then die. One of them was my father. He died without remembering her. He died without remembering me."

The topic of dementia is vast, and hits home for me personally. I've read a great many books about Alzheimer's ( thirty, at least), and Hard to Forget, because of its lucid prose and well-told stories, is one I read with enormous interest. There's plenty of information here about the disease, all readable and engaging--and the book is lit up by a closely-considered danger: the possibility that the author himself could come down with what has become a family disease. And the author has children. It's a good thing those scientists are hard at work.

I decided to read this book based on a review in The New York Times book review, and the recent knowledge that a family member's symptoms have been tentatively diagnosed as possibly early signs of Alzheimer's. I found the story gripping, but the execution sometimes got in the way for me. I suspect that a more interventionist editor might have forced Pierce to drop some of the unnecessarily detailed place descriptions and reorganized the order of presentation to be more coherent. As it is, however, the book provides lots of interesting and useful information, mixing the history of research on the disease with the personal memoir of Pierce and his family coping with the disease as manifested in his father, uncles and aunt. It is not an easy read, but it is worth the effort.

I just finished Charles Pierce's book and must say that I was very moved by it. In reading your reviews I was struck by the comments by the research scientist who pointed out all the errors in Mr. Pierce's telling. Perfect illustration of his point, I think. We readers aren't quite as concerned with the exact dates as we are with the the evolution of the research as a whole. Can't you all just get along?

This book is a bit technical in places yet provides an eye opening look into the competitive work of medical research. This shouldn't be the first book one reads about Alzheimer's. There are more helpful books for those in the trenches.