THE FORGETTING: Alzheimer's: Portrait of an Epidemic.

• Author: Brownlee, Shannon
• Position: Review

THE FORGETTING: Alzheimer's: Portrait of an Epidemic by David Shenk Doubleday, $26.00

Remembrance of Things Past

FOR THOSE OF US OF A CERTAIN age, fretting about Alzheimer's goes beyond the usual worries that come with aging--that we will dribble soup on our shirts, or become financial burdens to our children, or die alone and forgotten in some urine-soaked bed in a nursing home. Admit it. You felt that frisson of fear the first time you turned to the list of phone numbers pinned to your bulletin board, only to realize you couldn't remember the name of the person you wanted to call. And when you searched the entire house only to discover the car keys in the ignition, or a bathroom drawer, or the refrigerator, you thought to yourself: This is the beginning.

Alzheimer's engenders a special kind of horror that has little to do with how it will actually feel to be afflicted, since victims are largely unaware of what is happening to them by the time the disease destroys the mind. For one thing, Alzheimer's, like tuberculosis in the 19th century and cancer in the 20th, has been encumbered by metaphor. In destroying memory, it slowly robs the self, leaving behind an uninhabited body, a husk of a person. That's a particularly cruel fate for members of the baby-boomer "me" generation, we who transformed society in the '60s, who became masters of the universe on Wall Street, who ushered in the biggest economic boom in history, and who are now turning to collagen injections and biceps implants in attempts to stay young forever. On a more practical level, 15 million of us will be diagnosed with Alzheimer's by 2050, at an estimated annual cost of $700 billion. If we think Social Security isn't going to have enough young workers to sustain it, we should also be wondering who is going to take care of us when we can't remember what a car is, let alone where we put the keys.

The Forgetting offers some comfort. As author David Shenk makes clear, the race to find a cure or a treatment for Alzheimer's is proceeding at breakneck speed, and chances are good that science will beat the aging of the boomers. The author of Data Smog, a penetrating look at technology's cultural impact, Shenk explains the biology of Alzheimer's with uncommon clarity. Even the most steadfast of scientifically illiterate readers can grasp how the disease slowly obliterates the mind by littering the brain with sticky clumps of dead tissues, and tangling the scaffolding that supports the...