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Alzheimer's Families and the Search for a Cure
by Jennie Erin Smith
The riveting account of a community from the remote mountains of Colombia whose rare and fatal genetic mutation is unlocking the secrets of Alzheimer's disease.
In the 1980s, a neurologist named Francisco Lopera traveled on horseback into the mountains seeking families with symptoms of dementia. For centuries, residents of certain villages near Medellín had suffered memory loss as they reached middle age, going on to die in their fifties. Lopera discovered that a unique genetic mutation was causing their rare hereditary form of early onset Alzheimer's disease. Over the next forty years of working with the "paisa mutation" kindred, he went on to build a world-class research program in a region beset by violence and poverty.
In Valley of Forgetting, Jennie Erin Smith brings readers into the clinic, the laboratories, and the Medellín trial center where Lopera's patients receive an experimental drug to see if Alzheimer's can be averted. She chronicles the lives of people who care for sick parents, spouses, and siblings, all while struggling to keep their own dreams afloat. These Colombian families have donated hundreds of their loved ones' brains to science and subjected themselves to invasive testing to help uncover how Alzheimer's develops and whether it can be stopped. Findings from this unprecedented effort could hold the key to understanding and treating the disease, though it is unclear what, if anything, the families will receive in return.
Smith's immersive storytelling brings this complex drama to life, inviting readers on a scientific journey that is as deeply moving as it is engrossing.
"A multigenerational saga that is a compelling story in itself... . [Smith] has spent years inside the homes of both the patients and the researchers, and in exam rooms and other intimate spaces that give the author a stunning level of vivid firsthand detail." —BookPage(starred review)
"In this powerful report, journalist Smith (Stolen World) details neurologist Francisco Lopera Restrepo's quest to understand the epidemic of early-onset dementia afflicting families in the rural Antioquia region of Colombia...It's a poignant depiction of a community in crisis." —Publishers Weekly
"Solid medical reportage with a hopeful conclusion that science may soon bring a cure for a devastating disease." —Kirkus Reviews
"Jennie Erin Smith writes with such narrative skill, such empathy and curiosity, such a strong sense of the place where science and people meet, that you come out with the feeling of having witnessed an extraordinary investigation into the mysteries of what makes us human." —Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling
"Valley of Forgetting is the masterfully told story of how, over the past four decades, a human drama of extraordinary significance has quietly unfolded in a rural province of Colombia. Jennie Erin Smith deserves a wide readership for this book that is at once revealing, unsettling, timely, and ultimately, deeply moving." —Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life and To Lose a War
This information about Valley of Forgetting was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jennie Erin Smith is the author of Stolen World. She is a regular contributor to the New York Times and has written for the Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, and others. She is a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award; the Waldo Proffitt Award for Excellence in Environmental Journalism in Florida; and two first-place awards from the Society for Features Journalism. She lives in Florida and Colombia.
Happy Land
by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
From the New York Times bestselling author, a novel about a family's secret ties to a vanished American Kingdom.
If every country had to write a book about elephants...
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