QUIET: THE POWER OF INTROVERTS IN A WORLD THAT CAN'T STOP TALKING by Susan Cain

I almost wish they hadn't added that "New York Times bestseller" strip across the top of the book jacket - it disturbs the cool, mineral quiet of the original cover. I fully understand why Susan Cain's Quiet is selling so well, though. Of all the books I've read so far this year - and last year too, for that matter - this is the one about which I've most often told my friends, "You've got to read it."

Here's the book's premise, from the Introduction:

We live with a value system that I call the Extrovert Ideal - the omnipresent belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha, and comfortable in the spotlight. The archetypal extrovert prefers action to contemplation, risk-taking to heed-taking, certainty to doubt. He favors quick decisions, even at the risk of being wrong. She works well in teams and socializes in groups. We like to think that we value individuality, but all too often we admire one type of individual - the kind who's comfortable "putting himself out there." Sure, we allow technologically gifted loners who launch companies in garages to have any personality they please, but they are the exceptions, not the rule, and our tolerance extends mainly to those who get fabulously wealthy or hold the promise of doing so.

Introversion - along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness - is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology. Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man's world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we've turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.

Introverts, take heart - Cain is riding to your rescue (or perhaps just quietly sidling up beside you), providing more cures for your feelings of guilt, inadequacy, shame, or discomfort than you'd get from a year of therapy. Extroversion hasn't always been as highly valued as it is in contemporary America, she points out, giving a brief history of Dale Carnegie and others who helped make us a nation of self-marketers. And while extroversion is important, too much Groupthink can dampen creativity and impede progress. Introverts have gifts we ignore at our peril (Cain links the Wall Street crash, for example, to a shortage of introverted thinking).

Cain's observations range widely, from office space (down with the open plan!) to brain chemistry to education. She offers practical advice for the hypersensitive, for those panicked by public speaking, for parents of introverted children, for spouses of opposite personality types. Along the way she reports on research and tells fascinating stories. Though a lawyer by profession, Cain is an excellent journalist.

But much as I enjoyed Cain's writing style, the reason I've been telling everybody to read this book is because so many of my friends are introverts. If they're anything like me, they'll find Cain wonderfully affirming next time they find themselves at coffee hour in a strange church, or next time they have to navigate a giant get-acquainted reception at a convention, or next time the in-service education director brightly says, "OK, folks, let's break into small groups and share ..."

Oh, and it's OK if you blush when everyone turns to look at you. Embarrassment, says a researcher whose work Cain describes, "is a moral emotion. It shows humility, modesty, and a desire to avoid aggression and make peace. It's not about isolating the person who feels ashamed ..., but about bringing people together." A blush signifies concern for others.

INSIDE OF A DOG by Alexandra Horowitz

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.

Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."

- attributed to Groucho Marx

Alexandra Horowitz has both a personal and a professional interest in dogs. Besotted with her own dogs - the late lamented Pumpernickel and the current model, Finnegan - she is also an assistant professor of psychology at Barnard College, where she studies animal cognition. According to Barnard's website, she "is currently testing anthropomorphisms made of the domestic dog, through experiments with dogs in natural settings."

Dogs, she points out, are not people. They perceive the world in an entirely different way from how we perceive it, and if we expect dogs to have human responses to our bumbling attempts to befriend and train them, we'll be disappointed. (So that's why my dogs never respond to my carefully reasoned explanations!) She labels the-world-as-perceived-by-dogs their umwelt, and much of the book is an explanation of how the world looks, sounds, feels, and especially smells to our canine friends.

On the other hand - and contrary to much popular opinion - she insists that dogs are not wolves. After at least ten thousand years of domestication, many of their physical, psychological, social, and developmental characteristics set them apart from their near relatives. "As the domestication process probably began with early canids scavenging around human groups - eating our table scraps," she writes, "it is a particularly silly stance to feed dogs only raw meat, on the theory that they are wolves at heart. Dogs are omnivores who for millennia have eaten what we eat."

Dogs, says Horowitz, are anthropologists. They study our behavior - our typical actions, and especially every minute variation of or departure from our usual theme. They know when we're thinking about going for a walk. They know how to persuade us to give them food. They may not actually feel guilt or shame (the jury is out on that one), but they know when they're likely to be punished.

And they know how to communicate. Not only with us (wag, lick, dance, growl) but also with other dogs: in one fascinating chapter, Horowitz describes how dogs invite each other to play, how they respond to another dog's invitation to play, how they play, and why they will play with some dogs and not others.

Are dogs, then, highly intelligent? Do they ponder philosophical questions? Most important, do they really, truly, love us? Read Horowitz and see what you think.

If you're only ever going to read one book on animal behavior, though, the book to read is Temple Grandin's highly original Animals in Translation. Once you've read that, you probably won't be able to keep from reading Grandin's follow-up book, Animals Make Us Human (my review is here). If those books whet your appetite - or if you want to skip the parrots and monkeys and cows and head straight for dogs - Inside of a Dog is a good choice. It's research based, well documented, aimed at a general audience, and seasoned with humor.

Your dogs will thank you for reading it - though if they had their druthers, you'd first take them for a walk.

CINDERELLA ATE MY DAUGHTER by Peggy Orenstein

My daughters still make fun of me for one of my motherly quirks:  in the 1970s, I would not let them have Barbie dolls. To compensate, I gave them dolls from The Sunshine Family - a gentle suburban hippie couple and their tiny daughter, Sweets.

The Sunshine Family was not materialistic like Barbie. You could buy accessories for them, but they were things any impoverished young family might need, including a set of grandparents. They cared about the environment. They did crafts. They farmed.

They did not take the world by storm.

Princesses, by contrast, are huge. Bigger than Barbie ever was, though the grande dame of sexy dolls has pretty much given up practicing medicine (106 hits for "doctor Barbie" at amazon.com) and jumped into the royal coach herself (1681 hits for "princess Barbie"). Go to Barbie's princess website (dazzlingly pink!), and you'll be greeted by a perky electronic voice: "Shop time! A girl's just gotta wear a tiara!" That's the essence of Peggy Orenstein's complaint in Cinderella Ate My Daughter - not that playing princess is bad, but that the way princess play is being marketed to young girls raises all kind of red - or at least pink - flags.

Disney princesses, she writes, "did not exist until 2000. That's when a former Nike executive named Andy Mooney rode into Disney on a metaphoric white horse to rescue its ailing consumer products division" by producing toys, clothes, and other items to go with Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Ariel, Belle, and, to a lesser degree, Snow White, Jasmine, Mulan, and Pocahontas. The first year showed sales of $300 million; by 2009 sales had reached $4 billion.

And that was just Disney. Lots of other manufacturers took notice and started rolling out pink products too. When Orenstein visited the toy industry's largest annual trade show, she

lost count of the myriad pink wands and crowns (feathered, sequined, and otherwise bedazzled) and infinite permutations of pink poodles in purses.... The Disney Princesses reigned over a new pink Royal Interactive Kitchen with accompanying pink Royal Appliances and pink Royal Pots and Pans set (though I would have thought one of the perks of monarchy would be that someone else did the cooking). There were pink dinnerware sets emblazoned with the word PRINCESS; pink fun fur stoles and boas; pink princess beds; pink diaries (embossed with PRINCESS, BALLERINA, or butterflies); pink jewelry boxes; pink vanity mirrors, pink brushes, and toy pink blow-dryers; pink telephones; pink bunny ears; pink gowns; pink height charts ...

Well, you get the idea.

So, is this obsession with princesses really a problem, or is it just a harmless fad? Frivolous fun or regression to a pre-feminist era? Orenstein asks a lot of rhetorical questions as she looks not only at girls' toys but at beauty pageants for little girls, girls in children's literature, girl pop stars who quickly "slide from squeaky to skanky," girls' body image, girls online, and - the pink thread running through it all - how a certain version of femininity has become a marketing bonanza. Though her tone is light and often humorous, it's easy to see that she's worried. When she was a girl, it was an insult to call someone a "Jewish American princess." For her daughter, however, princess is a good word.

Trouble is, our little contemporary princesses are being taught that true love comes to those who are beautiful, and that beauty is the result of buying the right stuff. It was not always thus:

In her indispensable book The Body Project, the historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg wrote that for girls growing up before World War I, becoming a better person meant being less self-involved: helping others, focusing on schoolwork, becoming better read, cultivating empathy. To bring home the point, she compared New Year's resolutions of girls at the end of the nineteenth century with those at the end of the twentieth. Here's what a young woman of yore wrote:
   "Resolved: to think before speaking. To work seriously. To be self-restrained in conversations and actions. Not to let my thoughts wander. To be dignified. Interest myself more in others."
   And the contemporary girl:
   "I will try to make myself better in any way I possibly can.... I will lose weight, get new lenses, already got new haircut, good makeup, new clothes and accessories."

If this is typical, I'm terrified. As Orenstein points out, narcissism scores among college students are on the rise even as empathy scores plummet. Four-year-old princesses today may be cute, but what happens when the workforce is overrun with 20-, 30-, and 40-year-old princesses?

Perhaps, though, the situation isn't as dire as Orenstein fears. I would never go so far as to say that someone in my family is typical, but looking at my teen-aged granddaughters gives me hope. When Katie was maybe three years old, she fell off an ottoman and broke her arm while playing Cinderella (it is risky, even for a princess, to twirl on an ottoman). Now 16, she picked up my copy of Cinderella Ate My Daughter and started to read. "Is it any good?" I asked.

"I dunno," she said. "I've figured out that being beautiful just isn't all that important."

VIRTUALLY YOU by Elias Aboujaoude

A virulent danger lurks in our homes, in our offices and—very likely—in our pockets. It may rewire our brains and erect a barrier between us and our cultural heritage (says Nicholas Carr in The Shallows). It may play havoc with our personal relationships and our sense of identity (cautions Sherry Turkle in Alone Together).

It may even nudge us into full-fledged pathological behavior, either creating new disorders or bringing out abnormalities that already lie deep within us. So warns Elias Aboujaoude—a psychiatrist and the director of Stanford University's Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Clinic located in Silicon Valley, the world's technological heart—author of Virtually You, one of this year's most thought-provoking jeremiads.

The danger, according to a swelling chorus of authors, is the Inter­net, or the way we use the Internet, or the way we have stopped doing a lot of things we used to do before the Internet took over our lives. "While the Internet is a force for good in many arenas," writes Aboujaoude, "it also has the power to interfere with our home lives, our romantic relationships, our careers, our parenting abilities—and our very concept of who we are."

From the opening paragraphs of my review, newly published in "Christian Century" magazine and on its website. Read the rest of the review by clicking here.

THE SOCIAL ANIMAL by David Brooks

Last December a couple of magazine editors asked me to read a galley of David Brooks's then-forthcoming book, The Social Animal: A Story of Love, Character, and Achievement, and consider reviewing it. After reading the galley, I declined.

I didn't hate the book as much as P.Z. Myers does in his hilarious Salon review, "David Brooks' Dream World for the Trust Fund Set," though you might want to read Myers before tackling Brooks. Equally dismissive but more analytical is Will Wilkinson's "Scornful Review" on his Forbes blog. And while philosopher Thomas Nagel, who analyzes "David Brooks's Theory of Human Nature" in the New York Times, is not dismissive, he too seems less than impressed by Brooks's argument and presentation.

I sent one of the editors a lengthy e-mail explaining why I didn't want to review the book, which was published last week. Here's what I told him:

... I’m less enthusiastic about it than I hoped I’d be. Brooks is writing about the primacy of the unconscious over the conscious mind, and secondarily (I think) the primacy of interpersonal relationships over rational constructs. Basically he’s synthesizing a lot of books he’s read, and he’s presenting the findings in more-or-less story form as he follows the lives of two imaginary characters, Harold and Erica. Weirdly, he has his characters living in the eternal present, as he warns us up front—at every stage of their life, they seem to be living in about 2010.

This framework allows Brooks to pontificate on lots of things that are dear to his heart, especially in the chapter “The Soft Side” in which Harold joins a think tank and ruminates on everything that Brooks thinks about (“He spent those years writing his essays, peppering the world with his policy proposals. Not many people seemed to agree with him. There was a New York Times columnist whose views were remarkably similar to his own, and a few others. Still, he plugged away, feeling that he was mostly right about things and that someday others would reach the conclusions he had reached.”)

The book also includes a great deal of typical Brooks humor. Unlike some reviewers of his previous books, I generally enjoyed the humor, though it sometimes seemed discordant with his sociological musings.

Summary: the book put a lot of interesting research together, but it did not break any new ground. Harold and Erica kept my attention, but I didn’t identify with either of them – and I’m not sure that many other readers would either. Erica is a driven over-achiever from an underprivileged background who ends up in the halls of power, partly thanks to Harold’s support and occasional wisdom. Harold doesn’t really seem to be anybody, though he has good people skills. They have quite a lot of money and no kids. When they retire, they lead overseas tours three times a year until they can’t do that anymore, and then they buy a second home in Aspen. Who are these people, and could they exist anywhere but inside the Beltway?

Anyway, I do plan to comment on the book on The Neff Review, though I won’t publish my comments until March, when the book is published. But I’ve lost my enthusiasm for writing a review for [your magazine]. This is by no means to say that it shouldn’t be reviewed. Brooks says some fine things about relationships and the unconscious and why we need to get past mechanistic Enlightenment reasoning, or at least move from the French to the English Enlightenment. Another of your authors may be perfectly suited to review it.

I loved Brooks's first book, Bobos in Paradise. I liked his second, On Paradise Drive. I managed to finish reading his third, The Social Animal. I appreciate the irenic tone of his op-ed pieces, and I wish him well. I hope he takes a refreshing sabbatical before starting another book.

THE SHALLOWS by Nicholas Carr

Three months ago I commented briefly on The Shallows, a then-hot-off-the-press warning that the Internet could lead to "a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization." At the same time I e-mailed a review of the book to The Christian Century magazine. You can finally read my review here.

Ironically, thanks to the Internet, The Shallows is already old news. Numerous commentaries on the controversial book have been published during the three months required to get my review into print. (This is not the Century's fault, by the way; it's just how print publication works.)

What's more, the print version isn't even as helpful as an online version could have been. If I'd posted my review on my blog, you would have been able to click through to Carr's original article in The Atlantic as well as to more info on Carr's other books.

Clearly print publication has some major limitations.

If Carr's thesis about the Internet is right, however, our minds are already too fried to read an entire magazine article anyway. Chances are, if I'd posted it online, readers would have clicked the first link and stopped reading the review. So I'm not going to write more about The Shallows here--Carr would suggest that this 246-word post may already be testing the limits of your attention span. But since (according to Carr) you really enjoy clicking links, let me encourage you to check out my complete review--"How Our Minds Have Changed"--here.

JIGSAW: AN UNSENTIMENTAL EDUCATION by Sybille Bedford

In a house that is anchored and insulated with books, a book occasionally goes missing for its entire lifespan. Someone must have given me Sybille Bedford's Jigsaw some ten years ago, right after the 1989 novel was reissued with a new introduction. I found it last week in my bedside bookcase, brand new, untouched, and out of print.

"She is one of the best writers in English, and Jigsaw may be the best of her books," said the Boston Globe reviewer quoted on the cover. Well, maybe, if the reader has high tolerance for erratic punctuation and destructively haphazard lives. It is hard to put this book down, just as it would be hard to stop watching a train bearing down on a car stalled on the tracks.

The story starts in about 1913 with the narrator, still in her pram, being asked to sleep through one of her mother's infidelities. It ends less than 20 years later, by which time the mother has destroyed her own health, sanity, and relationships. She has apparently not destroyed her daughter, the narrator, though the young woman is in a precarious place.

The reason we suspect the narrator will survive and thrive is because Jigsaw is not really a novel, even though the cover says it is. It is Bedford's coming-of-age memoir, billed as fiction only to allow her certain liberties with names and events. "What I had in mind," Bedford wrote in her introduction, "was to build a novel out of the events and people who had made up, and marked, my early youth.... It had to be a novel in which the events had actually happened and happened largely as described; to invent, such was my instinct, would have been pointless: it mattered that these things had occurred."

Born to an eccentric German baron and his German-English-Jewish wife, Sybille spent her earliest years with her eccentric father in a crumbling castle in southern Germany. Later she joined her peripatetic mother for months at a time in Italy and in the south of France, and for several years she lived pretty much on her own in London - all before she was out of her teens.

You can learn more about Sybille's life from her obituaries in various newspapers - the Times, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Telegraph - but you will quickly note that dates and places are far from uniform. I'm guessing the fictionalized story in Jigsaw is closer to the truth than some of the supposedly factual obits.

Why might you want to read Jigsaw? Let me count the ways.

• You enjoy memoirs
• You're interested in the Roaring Twenties, the "lost generation," the Jazz Age
• You like to read F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, the Bloomsbury Set
• You feel better when you read about people whose problems are much worse than your own
• You have a clinical interest in dysfunctional family systems

Less than a  year before her death, Bedford wrote a book she called a memoir, Quicksand. According to a review in the Observer, it tells pretty much the same story she already told in Jigsaw. Both books describe a childhood in an environment of failed marriages, serial adultery, child abandonment, haphazard education, gambling addiction, drug addiction, financial ruin, narcissism ... in short, nearly every kind of dysfunction and codependence imaginable, more than 50 years before pop psych popularized those terms. I would have expected Sybille to die young and tragically.

Instead, she began writing for publication when she was middle-aged. Her works include the 832-page Aldous Huxley: A Biography as well as several novels, books on travel, and accounts of court trials. According to her obituary in the Independent, she

was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature - elected one of the society's 10 Companions of Literature in 1994 - and was appointed OBE in 1981. She was also an active member of the English Pen Club, and its Vice-President in 1979. Her joie de vivre expressed itself in an abiding curiosity about human beings, a deep love of nature, and a lifelong interest in wine.

She died shortly before her 95th birthday.

STILL ALICE by Lisa Genova and THE WILDERNESS by Samantha Harvey

This review was first published in Books and Culture online (June 2009) as "Into the Abyss with Alice and Jake: Two novels about Alzheimer's disease"

Early this year, two improbable first novels hit the market. Both feature a protagonist with Alzheimer's disease, and both tell the person's story from his or her point of view alone. As dementia mounts, no omniscient narrator intervenes to explain, correct, or fill in the widening gaps.

Still Alice, by Lisa Genova, a 38-year-old American actress and neuroscientist with a Harvard PhD, enjoyed a good run on the New York Times bestseller list. Alice Howland, 50 years old and a well-known Harvard professor, is troubled by occasional forgetfulness. Is it menopause? A brain tumor? The lapses increase in frequency. She gets lost on her usual jogging route. She blows off a speaking appointment in Chicago. She is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's.

Genova tells Alice's story in familiar hen-lit style, focusing on Alice's relationships, especially with her husband and children, as well as on her sense of self. The story is straightforward and linear, covering three years in Alice's life. Though the point of view is third-person, it is always Alice's, growing more confused as her condition deteriorates. The book is emotionally gripping and a bit romantic: through it all, Alice, though greatly diminished, is still Alice.

By contrast, The Wilderness, by Samantha Harvey, a 34-year-old British woman with degrees in philosophy and creative writing, has received glowing reviews but few American sales. This is probably because Harvey tells Jake Jameson's story through the medium of literary fiction—a genre in which, as its detractors are keen to point out, nothing much happens, a great deal of thinking goes on, chronology is a puzzle rather than an anchor, and at the end of the book, the main character is even more miserable than at its beginning.

Most readers, myself among them, prefer likable characters, a page-turning plot, and manageable conflict that leads to some sort of satisfactory resolution. But Alzheimer's disease isn't like a romance or a mystery or even a fairly realistic piece of hen lit. It is, rather, very much like a literary novel, and Harvey's use of this genre gives her book a feeling of realism that Genova's more conventionally realistic novel can only approximate.

Four people I loved had Alzheimer's disease: my father, my mother, my mother-in-law, and my best friend's mother. I know the grief of a disease that wipes out memory, destroys knowledge, alters personality, stirs up emotions, impairs judgment, removes control of bodily functions, and finally turns its victims into little more than the skin and stuffing of their former selves. I have wondered how this disease, so devastating to the people who observe it, must feel to the person who has it.

Samantha Harvey knows.

Well, she can't really know, any more than anyone can really know what it feels like to be dead. Near-death is not the kind of death that stays dead, and no amount of experience with Alzheimer's patients can put us in their heads. Still, Harvey convincingly sees through Jake's eyes, even though she tells his story in the third person.

Jake, a 65-year-old architect, is driving to his office along familiar roads:

He looks around his car and tries to remember what make it is; he cannot. He opens the window to feel what month it is. It isn't a month. There aren't months. There are just happenings, a lack of signposts … . He pulls up at the side of the road, lifts his glasses, and rubs his eyes. He has been doing this journey to and from work every day for thirty-five years. He pores over the map.

He is about to retire, and none too soon. He has spent all day trying to figure out what to do with the architectural drawing that has been passed to him for approval. He can't recall his secretary's name or what exactly she does. But he is polite and articulate, and he can rise to the occasion. "I am going to spend my retirement seeking beauty," he announces at his going-away party. Instead, he spends it searching for himself.

His confusion would be intolerable were it not for his rich memories, most of them about women: his formidable Jewish mother, Sara; his devout wife, Helen; his beloved daughter, Alice; his childhood friend, Eleanor; the girl in the yellow dress, Joy. Through recalled events, scenes, stories, and conversations we piece together a picture of his life and that of his family.

Jake is a disappointed man. He was once a successful architect, but his modernist buildings fell out of favor. He loved his wife, but she died of a stroke and now he is suspecting she was unfaithful to him. He had two children that he adored, but Henry is in prison after an alcohol-fueled rampage, and Alice is dead.

Or not. The stories change in the telling and retelling, and the reader—like Jake himself—comes to doubt even the bare outline of his life. Themes, images, characters weave in and out. Who climbed the cherry tree, Helen or Alice? Did Alice die young—of an accident, or was it an illness?—or is she still alive, or was she never born at all? What happened to the money under the bed? Who is writing all the letters—the ones from Joy, the ones to Helen, the one from Eleanor? Who ran over the dog?

Is it possible for Jake, or the reader, to know anything for sure?

In his brain are countless cells—countless, but not infinite. To say infinite would be reckless. Inside each cell a little piece of him is packed, and every time a cell dies a piece of him dies. His past is just an electric impulse. Static flashes on a petticoat. Gradually he is being scattered and lost—hundreds of unread messages floating out across the sea.

Unlike Still Alice, The Wilderness is not a typical book-club selection, though I can imagine book-club participants avidly trying to sort out the factual from the invented, the real from the hallucinatory. Such an exercise would certainly elucidate Harvey's amazing art, and it might well lead to a good discussion on the importance of memory to personhood. Some readers would side with Jake's wife, talking about her war-injured father:

That man with only one foot was still my daddy. If he'd had no feet, no hands, no legs, he'd still be my daddy. So we can't be our bodies alone. And if we are not our bodies we must be something else."
"Our brains," he said.
"More than that, Jake.
"Why more than that?"
"His soul shone out through his eyes. I saw his soul."

Others, more pessimistic, would resonate with Jake's anguish:

There were times—there are still—when he would face the darkness of three a.m. and be terrified by the idea of entropy: nature dismantling every human object, and eventually every human being, until there was just an unfettered, cold chaos. Other people had God to protect them from such an outcome, but he had nothing—nothing except himself.

Who, then, is "himself" after his brain succumbs to chaos and all the messages have floated out to sea?
I used to think that a person with Alzheimer's was completely different from the rest of us. "Senile," we said of the old lady who shared the board-and-care home with my grandmother. She was clearly out to lunch—her words made no sense to any of us, and her behavior was bizarre. "I hope I never get like her," said Grandma. (She didn't.)

But when my parents developed Alzheimer's, I came to realize that the disease did not immediately destroy the persons they once were. Flashes of normality sometimes cut through the fog. Reasoning and logic persisted, even in the absence of accurate information. Imagination stepped in and filled in the blanks. My father, who loved to travel, told us of his travels to Israel and India—where he had never gone—which he now remembered happily, and in detail. Emotions continued to register, even after my mother lost the ability to talk.

Still Alice, as the title indicates, takes the popular sanguine view: despite the ravages of Alzheimer's, whatever makes Alice herself remains. Jake shares this view, at least while his disease is still only moderately severe:

When he looks in the mirror he does not see an old man, nor does he see a brain that lacks logic. He sees himself, greatly changed, but undeniably himself, and he is grateful to this self for persisting this long.

Eventually, ineluctably, the man in the mirror becomes unfamiliar. In one of the book's last scenes, Jake recognizes a man in a photograph but does not know he is looking at himself. Is he still Jake?

Harvey captures the mix of understanding and mystery that is Alzheimer's disease and that is also the human condition. She raises thought-provoking questions about memory and personhood and the soul. If you prefer a fast-paced, informative, easy-to-understand novel, read Still Alice first. But when you are ready to plunge into the abyss and experience Alzheimer's first-hand with all its confusion and tears and unanswerable questions, find a quiet place where you can ponder and weep, and read The Wilderness.