The Vanishing Family: Love, Fate, and the Quest to End Dementia
Mr. Kolker has written the biography of a family, making sure that each member is memorialized as a full person before disease enters the picture. Yet even as the siblings lose their sophistication and their self-control to a degree that mortifies their loved ones, Mr. Kolker sees more than tragedy in his subjects’ second selves. 'All people who suffer from dementia . . . remain alive and, in their new way, conscious,' he writes. They have joys and desires, just not their former ones. Mr. Kolker handles complex neuroscience deftly but also remains attuned to the unique philosophical questions raised by FTD.
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The Vanishing Family is Kolker’s gripping follow-up to the best-selling Hidden Valley Road ... Here, as in that book, Kolker displays his genius for the immersive detail: calm, purposeful prose that builds to an extraordinary sense of knowing an entire family quite well ... Just as he did with the field of schizophrenia science, Kolker gives us a sweeping view of evolving brain research.
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Kolker burrows deeply into the psychological impact of an inherited disease on a single family and interweaves the personal tragedy with a more hopeful tale of scientific progress and discovery ... The Vanishing Family is, as much as anything, a plea for accelerated attention to either a medical cure or a genetic fix ... In probing the question of the self and its vulnerabilities, Kolker finds himself, like Kramer, on challenging philosophical terrain, with no definitive answers.
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