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

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 neurons necessary for memory. But this is not merely the story of the race for a cure. As good as the science in this book is, it takes a back seat to Shenk's eloquent reflections on the meaning of memory and aging, and their connection to our sense of self.

The Forgetting is at its best when Shenk is describing how memory works, and how its loss can have unexpected benefits. In the early stages of Alzheimer's, he explains, the short circuiting of short-term memory often forces patients to live in the Now, bringing an enriched awareness. One woman describes gazing at a red geranium, looking away, and then turning back to see the flower blaze anew. "All of waking life is a stew of familiar and unfamiliar experiences," writes Shenk. "It is the brain's job to turn the unfamiliar into the familiar ... [so] a person can do many things at once" Alzheimer's, as he puts it, "keeps things new."

For master abstract-expressionist painter Willem de Kooning, Alzheimer's also brought a freedom from the tyranny of conscious thought, and a period of extraordinary productiveness near the end of his life. In the late 1970s, de Kooning began showing the early signs of the disease, just as he was recovering from alcoholism and a period of hackneyed, sloppy painting. Over the next decade, as Alzheimer's picked off bits of the painter's memory, de Kooning produced an astonishing 341 luminous canvases, joyful paintings that some critics consider his best work. De Kooning's story and those of other public figures who suffered from Alzheimer's, including Ronald Reagan, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Jonathan Swift, make for fascinating reading, and Shenk tells them with dry humor and gentle insight.

All of which made it particularly frustrating to find that The Forgetting left me strangely cold. Perhaps it was because the book never really digs into the nitty-gritty of what it's like to be cooped up at home caring for a parent or spouse with Alzheimer's. Or because Shenk's descriptions of the disease often make it seem almost benign, a kind of sweet forgetfulness or second childhood. But when your two-year-old throws a tantrum, he generally doesn't throw a chair through a plate-glass window, as one Alzheimer's sufferer I know did. Sure, some Alzheimer's victims may slip into a quiet oblivion, but others have been known to mistake paint for juice, refuse to bathe, eat food without utensils, parade naked in front of guests, put the family's cats to sleep. I found myself longing for the emotional punch of Marion Roach's Another Name for Madness, the memoir of her beautiful, middle-aged mother's descent into Alzheimer's, a book that makes abundantly clear why the disease is classified medically as a dementia.

Near the end of The Forgetting, Shenk writes, "[Alzheimer's] is a condition specific to humans and as old as humanity that, like nothing else, acquaints us with life's richness by ever so gradually drawing down the curtains. Only through modern science has this poignancy been reduced to a plain horror, an utterly unhuman circumstance." Maybe so, but I am putting my money on the folks in the white lab coats, in the hopes that they will come up with a cure, or at least some kind of treatment, and soon. Now, if only I could remember the name of the person 1 wanted to call.

SHANNON BROWNLEE is a freelance writer in Maryland.