{ "item_title" : "Valley of Forgetting", "item_author" : [" Jennie Erin Smith "], "item_description" : "A WALL STREET JOURNAL TOP 10 BOOK OF 2025ALSO NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2025 BY THE NEW YORKER AND THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARYValley of Forgetting reminds us that scientific progress is measured not only in breakthroughs but also through the sacrifices people make, the trust that is built. It is a tender story of the unshakable will to make meaning in the face of inexorable loss. . . . Smith elegantly captures what it means to love, to belong, to hold on to one another when so much is uncertain. --Washington PostThe riveting account of a community from the remote mountains of Colombia whose rare and fatal genetic mutation is unlocking the secrets of Alzheimer's diseaseIn 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 Medell n 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 Medell n 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.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers4.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/0/52/553/607/0525536078_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "30.00", "online_price" : "30.00", "our_price" : "30.00", "club_price" : "30.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "30.00" } }

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In Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer's Families and the Search for a Cure, author Jennie Erin Smith is walking a two-way street. The families of mostly poor and working-class Colombians afflicted by a rare neurological condition serve as a narrative framework that allows Smith to tell the technical story of decades of groundbreaking brain research. But the research and the rare condition also serve to introduce the reader—and scientists and journalists around the world—to a multigenerational saga that is a compelling story in itself. Valley of Forgetting illustrates the lives of families from the hills around Medellin whose parents and cousins succumb to aggressive forms of Alzheimer’s disease, with symptoms first popping up in patients’ 30s and 40s. Doctors and researchers, both from Colombia and abroad, have spent decades trying to learn from the families, in the hopes that this unusual concentration of a rare form of the illness could lead to a cure. The book brings together tales of Big Pharma, academic colonialism, professional jealousy and medical ethics, all with the coincidental backdrop of the epicenter of an international drug war. It also raises tough-to-answer questions. Should patients at the highest risk for early-onset Alzheimer’s be told of their genetic precondition? Is it moral for those patients to have children, knowing the risk of passing on the genes is high? What does the global medical community owe poor people who participate in clinical trials? Two elements of the story stand out. First, the dedication with which the Colombian team has obsessively tracked and sought out new families over the course of decades, traipsing through militia-infested rural areas to add to their family trees and find new potential carriers. Second, the devotion of Smith herself, who 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. Smith’s bright, crisp portraits of both the studiers and the studied make the various scientific stumbling blocks encountered along the way all the more upsetting. The Alzheimer’s community, after all, had pledged to find a cure by 2025.