| International Standard Book Number |
9780385551045 (ebook)
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| International Standard Book Number |
9780385553278 (export)
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| International Standard Book Number |
9780385551038 (hardcover)
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| International Standard Book Number |
0385551037 (hardcover)
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| Personal Name |
Kolker, Robert, author.
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| Title Statement |
The vanishing family : love, fate, and the quest to end dementia / Robert Kolker.
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| Edition Statement |
First Doubleday hardcover edition.
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| Production, Publication, Distribution, Manufacture, and Copyright Notice |
New York : Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2026.
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| Physical Description |
xviii, 345 pages : genealogical table ; 25 cm.
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| General Note |
"Small portions of this work originally appeared, in different form, in The New York Times Magazine in 2023"--Title page verso.
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| Bibliography, Etc. Note |
Includes bibliographical references (pages [311]-325) and index.
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| Summary, Etc. |
"In the idyllic American town of Pleasant Hills, Pennsylvania, there lived a family with nine siblings, the youngest a girl named Barb. As the older children headed off to college and started their lives, only Barb was home to see their beautiful, still-young mother fall under a gothic spell, changing into someone she didn't recognize: withdrawn, neglectful, uncaring. Thus begins The Vanishing Family, journalist Robert Kolker's heartbreaking follow-up to his beloved Hidden Valley Road. This family, we learn, has a genetic mutation that causes dementia, but with an especially cruel twist. As early as their forties, formerly loving parents and hard-driving executives will lose their jobs, have affairs, take up drinking -- shed all inhibitions and sense of responsibility -- and become people their families hardly know. Their former personalities seem to vanish -- and there is a fifty-fifty chance that it will happen to their children, too. The Vanishing Family unfolds with dramatic intensity as the siblings begin to realize that what happened to their mother is happening to them: first one, then two, three, four, and more begin to change. Sue, in search of a calling, finds her place in caring for the others. Barb sets out to find a cure. Alongside their story, Kolker weaves in the dramatic scientific fight against dementia; after decades of blind alleys, this family's rare form of FTD (frontotemporal dementia) might lead to a breakthrough in the prevention and treatment of all dementia -- including the scourge of Alzheimer's disease. Moving, intimate, unexpectedly hopeful, The Vanishing Family is an enthralling narrative about one family's fate, and a medical detective story that speaks to all of us who fear losing ourselves at the end"-- Provided by publisher.
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| Subject Added Entry - Topical Term |
Genetics.
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| Subject Added Entry - Topical Term |
Resilience (Personality trait)
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| Subject Added Entry - Topical Term |
Dementia Patients Care.
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| Subject Added Entry - Topical Term |
Dementia Patients Family relationships.
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| Subject Added Entry - Topical Term |
Dementia Prevention.
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| Subject Added Entry - Topical Term |
Dementia Treatment.
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| Subject Added Entry - Topical Term |
Frontotemporal dementia Patients.
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| Subject Added Entry - Topical Term |
Frontotemporal dementia Research Case studies.
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| Index Term-Genre/Form |
Biographies.
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| Index Term-Genre/Form |
Creative nonfiction.
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| Index Term-Genre/Form |
Case studies.
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