Alzheimer's, a Love Story: One Year in My Husband's Journey

Readers keep awestruck and compassionate watch with Davidson as her husband's intellect dims, his vocabulary becomes gibberish. Candid, articulate, valiant, the author, a one-time speech therapist in Palo Alto, Calif., takes us into their lives both before and after Julian, a Stanford physiology professor and researcher, is diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 1990 at age 59. It is an anguished story. Determined not to pull away from him, Davidson sees to the increasingly difficult home care of her husband and provides him with stimulation while also meeting her responsibilities to her 82-year-old father, who has cancer, and speaking before gay-support groups, an activism she took on when one of her three offspring came out of the closet. ""Our life is `do-able,' "" Davidson comments, and readers will marvel at her resilience and patience in deciphering her husband's convoluted conversations, in dealing with his tendency to lose his bicycles, his inability to remember that his pajama top isn't worn over his suit coat: ""He is as transparent and lovable as a two-year-old, irrepressibly funny, living with fewer and fewer inhibitions."" If Julian was once a star in his field and his wife mourns their former life in academia, her resolve to ""go down"" in a spirit of love will leave few readers unmoved and provide sustenance to others in like situations. (May)