When Someone You Love Has Alzheimer's: The Caregiver's Journey - Hardcover

Rabbi Earl A. Grollman is an internationally recognized bereavement counselor who has been named Hero of the Heartland and given the Distinguished Human Service Award from Yeshiva University, among countless other awards. He is author of the best-selling Living When a Loved One Has Died (Beacon / 2719-7 / $10.00 pb), among many other books, and articles about him and his work have appeared in USA Today, Harper's, Reader's Digest, Ann Landers, People, and in virtually every major American daily. He lives in Belmont, Massachusetts.

Were it presented solely in prose paragraphs, this exemplary adviser would be much shorter than it is. Instead, its first four chapters, which proceed through the stages of dealing with Alzheimer's disease and their effects on the caregiver, take the form of free verse. The device doesn't make poetry of the text but does give it greater weight, just as the same kind of text display gives weight to the words in advertisements. Rabbi Grollman, author of these four chapters, is a seasoned writer on dealing with life crises; his words--simple, realistic, reassuring--merit the burden laid on them by the verselike presentation. This is excellent counsel, full of phrases that many may take as watchwords as they cope with an Alzheimer's-afflicted loved one. To Grollman's chapters, research physician Kosik adds one of questions and answers about the disease and its sufferers. An annotated resource list concludes. Ray Olson