Slow Dancing with a Stranger: Lost and Found in the Age of Alzheimer's - Softcover

Comer, Meryl

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0062130854 ISBN 13: 9780062130853

Publisher: HarperOne, 2015

Synopsis

Emmy-award winning broadcast journalist and leading Alzheimer’s advocate Meryl Comer’s Slow Dancing With a Stranger is a profoundly personal, unflinching account of her husband’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease that serves as a much-needed wake-up call to better understand and address a progressive and deadly affliction.

When Meryl Comer’s husband Harvey Gralnick was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease in 1996, she watched as the man who headed hematology and oncology research at the National Institutes of Health started to misplace important documents and forget clinical details that had once been cataloged encyclopedically in his mind. With harrowing honesty, she brings readers face to face with this devastating condition and its effects on its victims and those who care for them. Detailing the daily realities and overwhelming responsibilities of caregiving, Comer sheds intensive light on this national health crisis, using her personal experiences—the mistakes and the breakthroughs—to put a face to a misunderstood disease, while revealing the facts everyone needs to know.

Pragmatic and relentless, Meryl has dedicated herself to fighting Alzheimer’s and raising public awareness. “Nothing I do is really about me; it’s all about making sure no one ends up like me,” she writes. Deeply personal and illuminating, Slow Dancing With a Stranger offers insight and guidance for navigating Alzheimer’s challenges. It is also an urgent call to action for intensive research and a warning that we must prepare for the future, instead of being controlled by a disease and a healthcare system unable to fight it.

About this title

Review:

“Riveting and necessary.” (New York Times)

“An unflinching and intimate account...conveys a sense of passion and even frustration with a society that [Comer] believes has been slow to acknowledge the spread of Alzheimer’s disease or make adequate provisions to tend to its caregivers.” (Washington Post)

Alzheimer’s disease is a slow killer of the health and spirit of the caregiver- the secondary victim. Comer’s pain is contained in elegant writing and channeled into a worthy purpose. This book is a call to action as haunting and urgent as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. (Gail Sheehy, author of Passages in Caregiving and DARING: My Passages)

“In an unvarnished account of caring for a husband with dementia, Meryl Comer lays out the struggles and gallantry of a devoted and remarkable caregiver.” (Peter V. Rabins, M.D., MPH, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, author of The 36-Hour Day)

“No silver linings, no phony homages to ‘spiritual growth.’ Meryl Comer writes the unvarnished reality of being exposed as a wife, daughter, caregiver, and potential Alzheimer’s victim herself. Admire her bravery and honesty and applaud her for taking away some of the loneliness of the long distance caregiver.” (Ellen Goodman, Pulitzer Prize winning, nationally syndicated columnist and author of Turning Points to Value Judgments and Paper Trail: Common Sense in Uncommon Times)

“Slow Dancing With a Stranger is a remarkable and moving story that will change the way our generation thinks about how we deal with aging and caring for those we love. An amazing journey of caring, love, and resilience.” (Tom Rath, bestselling author of StrengthsFinder 2.0, How Full Is Your Bucket?, Strengths Based Leadership, and Eat Move Sleep)

This story is real. Meryl and Harvey are real. I don’t know what it’s going to take to wake the public up to this emerging catastrophe, but I suspect that emotional honesty is a key ingredient. Thank you, Meryl Comer, for telling it exactly like it is. (David Shenk, author of The Forgetting and creator of the Living with Alzheimer's Film Project)

“Meryl Comer in Slow Dancing with a Stranger unveils Alzheimer’s Disease in a remarkable and vulnerable way. Her personal story provides knowledge, inspiration and hope to us all. Her heroism jumps out from the pages and hopefully will motivate generations to make a difference against this horrible disease.” (David B. Agus, M.D., Professor of Medicine and Engineering, University of Southern California and author of The End of Illness and A Short Guide to a Long Life.)

“Comer received the Sargent and Eunice Shriver Profiles in Dignity Award in 2004, for her work as a dedicated advocate and remarkable, decade-long caregiver. Fast forward a decade later. In Slow Dancing With A Stranger, Meryl shows what it truly means to stay the course.” (Mark K. Shriver, Senior Vice President, Save the Children and author of A Good Man: Rediscovering My Father, Sargent Shriver)

“Meryl is a trailblazer in every aspect of Alzheimer’s and it shines through in this wonderful new book chronicling her long and winding journey with this devastating disease.” (Dr. Rudy Tanzi, New York Times Bestselling author of Super Brain and Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School)

About the Author:

Meryl Comer is an Emmy award–winning reporter, veteran TV producer, and business talk show host. She is president and CEO of the Geoffrey Beene Foundation Alzheimer's Initiative, which promotes early diagnosis, innovation, and national public service campaigns like Geoffrey Beene's Rock Stars of Science™ and the 2009 HBO Alzheimer's Project. A co-founder of WomenAgainstAlzheimer's, she is a recipient of the 2005 Shriver Profi les in Dignity Award and the 2007 Proxmire Award. Comer has been the subject of prime time news stories by ABC's Nightline and the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0062130854
• ISBN 13: 9780062130853
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240