She was at the peak of her career with plans ahead of her and they were all well and truly taken away from her, one slowly atrophying neuron at a time. Touching, heartbreaking and sympathetic Alice is a character you can’t help but feel for. From a time when Alice was still lecturing and a respected member of her field, needing only to leave herself lots of extra notes and reminders through to her no longer being able to work and needing more and more care.Īt one of her earliest appointments the neurologist tells Alice she is an unreliable source of information about what’s going on and yet it is her that tells her story, and she tells it well. Still Alice takes us from the early signs through to the late stages of the disease.

The diagnosis is not easy to swallow, for Alice or her husband. It started with small moments of forgetfulness or disorientation, attributed to being overstressed, menopausal and a normal part of the aging process. This is a brilliant mind, a challenged mind and certainly an exercised mind but Alzheimers didn’t care and took it anyway. Still Alice is the story of early onset Alzheimers sufferer Alice Howland and is told in the third person from her perspective.Īlzheimers is not going to be pleasant for anyone, there is no preferred age or profession, but I found that this story touched me profoundly because of Alice’s age and profession.Īlice Howland is a cognitive psychology professor at Harvard, a world-renowned linguistics expert and fifty years old. I hadn’t heard of this one before but the premise certainly grabbed my attention. It has now been re-released with a new cover in conjunction with the major motion picture, starring Julianne Moore, released on January 29 th. Still Alice was originally published by Simon & Schuster in 2009.

Remembering alice book