psychology dector

The Painting of You By William Michaelian Author’s Press Series Volume 1; $10.00, paper ISBN 978-0-557-12874-7 Ordering Information Long before we knew the term “Alzheimer’s Disease” we knew the signs. We called it senility, dementia, forgetfulness. I remember going to see my great-grandmother, then in her eighties, and finding half-eaten hamburgers in her cupboards with the clean plates. I remember another great-grandparent who spent all of her time in a single twin bed, staring at the ceiling, her lips gently moving as if speaking to someone up there. Her eyes were twin vacant holes, the pupils large and black, nearly blotting out the colored iris. Sometimes she would turn her head and stare directly into my six year old face, and it scared me, the emptiness, the lack of anything there, the body still animated, but the mind vanished, or vanquished by an invisible disease. Alois Alzheimer gave us the technical name for how we lose our loved ones, piece by piece, to a disintegrating m...

Photo courtesy of Wesleyan University Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War By William Manchester Little, Brown/Back Bay Books; $16.95, paper ISBN 978-0-316-50111-5 Late in William Manchester’s superb memoir of soldiering in the Pacific during World War II, he clarifies why no other generation since could do what they did. “To fight World War II,” he writes, “you had to have been tempered and strengthened in the 1930s Depression by a struggle for survival…And you had to know that your whole generation, unlike the Vietnam generation, was in this together…You needed nationalism, the absolute conviction that the United States was the envy of all other nations, a country which had never done anything infamous, in which nothing was insuperable, whose ingenuity could solve anything by inventing something. You felt sure that all lands, given our democracy and our know-how, could shine as radiantly as we did.” Do we long for those days of absolute evil on our doorstep? No, we long fo...