Book Review: Still Alice by Lisa Genova

I read this book 11/2011. I think this book is one of the most interesting and clever novels I have read in some time. I loved this book and was completely heartbroken at the same time.

The story centers around Alice, a 50 year old Harvard professor of cognitive psychology, so her life is as an academic who focuses on how the mind processes language and its uses. The novel begins right at her 50th birthday, as she begins to slowly notice little hiccups in her memory and its function. It is nothing that people do not experience everyday, including me in my early thirties. These occurrences start to become a little more frequent than she likes since she has such a razor sharp memory and impressive intellectual prowess (we would expect nothing less from any professor but, especially one who has tenure at Harvard).

At first she believes these instances are related to menopause, since she fits neatly into the 48-52 year old age bracket, and because slight memory issues or forgetfulness are common side effects of going through menopause. So she visits her family physician who tells her as such and she goes on for a little while somewhat confident/hopeful that this is the cause of her memory hiccups. Then she has a few incidents that make her visit the physician again and cause her to request to see a neurologist. After a bunch of neurological tests she is familiar with (teaching), the result is that she has early onset Alzheimer's disease, which she initially keeps from her family and colleagues. Eventually she must bring her husband in to the doctor's office since she soon will not be a reliable judge as to how much she is deteriorating.

The element in the novel that stuck with me the most is her blackberry. It is one of the things that carries us through her painful memory loss and mental deterioration the most because it reoccurs throughout the remaining chapters. Early on in her loss of mental acuity she makes a list of a few questions which chime in via her device every morning at 8am with instructions telling herself that if she cannot answer these questions than she should open a file on her computer called "butterfly." The questions ask her to answer: 1.What month is it? 2.Where do you live? 3.Where is your office 4.When is Anna's birthday (one of her daughters) and 5.How many children do you have? At the beginning the answers are clear and detailed, but as the chapters progress we see them become much simpler as she forgets, has trouble reading and typing, and eventually cannot read or type anything at all because it is too difficult to process. In an incident that was devastating for me, she loses the blackberry in a way that destroys its functionality, so she no longer gets her daily reminder, and therefore, forgets her "butterfly" file exists and forgets her ultimate plan, which is eluded to but not stated outright, that she will kill herself when her "self" is gone. And since she no longer has that reminder she has lost her plan and herself.

I connected to this book personally since I am also a college instructor in a field that requires me to remember and instantly recall a plethora of facts (art history). If I were to suffer from the same degenerative mental disease my career would also be over. As professors we define ourselves, in large part, by our mental prowess and ability to communicate with our students and colleagues. This book helped me feel what it would be like since we read it from Alice's point of view and not an outsider or caregiver.

I also learned a bit about Alzheimer's from this book. I did not know that there were three genetic markers for this disease which can be tested for, that early onset is hereditary, nor did I even realize that one could suffer the effects so early on in life. I, probably like many people, thought it was a disease of the elderly, and that memory loss was just a part of getting older. I am glad I now know more but, am equally frightened that it can happen at the pinnacle of a career.

I would recommend this book to learn more about the human side of suffering from a disease. It is a powerful novel, albeit a scary and sad one, but well worth reading. Sometimes it is easier to confront these issues through a novel because it becomes more personal than just reading statistics or medical language that the average person cannot understand. But, we can understand Alice, the fierce intellectual who controls every aspect of her world eventually having to live satisfied with loving chocolate ice-cream and only referring to her children as "the mother" and "the actress" because she doesn't know who they are anymore.

And so it goes...

Book Review: Wicked by Gregory Maguire

I read this book 11/2011. I really loved this book! I initially checked it out because it is the source material for the Broadway musical of the same name. I would like to one day see the musical, if I like say win the lottery and have the money to go, so I wanted to read the book first in case it is like most film adaptations of books where people always say "it was good but the book is better."

This is definitely not your children's version of Oz right from the beginning pages of the novel. There is a lot of sexual material in the book right from the start, often too much and I found that off-putting, and a fair amount of political matters as well. However, the story is a clever twist, especially if you are most familiar with the land of Oz via the classic movie The Wizard of Oz (1939) starring Judy Garland, or the children's' novels of L. Frank Baum. This is Oz for grownups.

The book centers around the life of Elphaba, who will eventually come to be known as "The Wicked Witch of the West," from her birth to her death. We get a peak at a few years of her childhood out in the country with her preacher father and loose mother who came from a titled family. Then we spend a year or so with her at college, which surprised me, and we learn how she came into contact with Galinda (eventually goes with the nickname Glinda we all know) who will become her friend and find Elphaba becoming a strong advocate for Animal rights (the difference between a mere animal and an Animal is explained in the book). This is also how she comes to be in the Emerald city, which is the next section of the book, in a secret group determined to take down the ruthless dictator of the city. Here the "wonderful wizard of Oz" is not so wonderful but a corrupt politician in every sense of the phrase. Eventually she takes a lover (some very adult content) and tries to be a young and strong-willed political activist. Things don't work out too well, so we flash forward to a few years later where she is in a kind of convent and leaving for the far west with a boy to rectify some of the tragedy surrounding the events of her and her lover whom she met in college and who was a prince. That is how she ends up in the castle, creates flying monkeys who talk (she is working on it), and eventually ends up meeting Dorothy and her ultimate demise via water, by accident.

The great quality of the book I think is that it makes Oz quite similar to real life. Elphaba is a young woman who is a bit different (green skin, allergic to water) and engaged in a spirited youthful drive to rid the world of cruelty to Animals and fight for Animal rights, beginning in her college years, which I think a good many of us can relate to: youthful enthusiasm and the desire to change the world. She then goes through a few bumps and bruises along the way while trying to live a good life, but things just don't quite work out for her.

Oz is more of a mix of power hungry politicians and the social elite instead of a land where good and evil are clearly defined. Elphaba was not a wicked person nor was she born a "witch," that was a chosen and respected profession in the book, to become a sorceress. In actuality she was following the path of science and the study of how Animals acquired the higher intelligence that they had which separated them from the mere barn animals that were sources of food. And her death was not the great and justified quest to rid the world of evil as it was in the film. It was a mere accident in the tower, which I will leave for you to discover when you read this interesting contemporary novel.

Needless to say I think this book was excellent and causes you to look at Oz as another world, one that is a fantasy where magic is common but, not with the simple and clearly defined epic quest of one chosen good person struggling against a token tyrant, at least not in the way the movies always make them in an Arthurian sort of way. As in real life, what is "wicked" is sometimes a matter of perspective and intentions. I am now reading the second book in the series Son of a Witch, and it is revealing even more about the story of Elphaba and the crazy land of Oz, hooking the readers with bits and pieces about the mysterious character of Mother Yackle and her role in the events of both books. There seems to be a much larger conspiracy afoot...

I would recommend this book to fans of the Oz story who want a more true-to-life idea of the land and those who like fiction in general, but definitely not to a youth audience, this is not a children's version of Oz.

And so it goes...