How to be Alone
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Passionate, independent-minded nonfiction from the international bestselling author of ‘The Corrections’.Jonathan Franzen's ‘Freedom’ was the literary sensation of 2010, whilst ‘The Corrections’ was the best-loved and most written-about novel the previous decade. ‘How to be Alone’, is a collection of the personal essays and painstaking, often humorous reportage that have earned Franzen a wide and loyal readership, including what has come to be known as 'The Harper's Essay', Franzen's controversial 1996 look at the fate of the novel. From the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax prison works, from his father's struggle with Alzheimer's disease to a rueful account of Franzen's brief tenure as an Oprah Winfrey author, each piece wrestles with Franzen's familiar themes: the erosion of civic life and private dignity, and the hidden persistence of loneliness, in postmodern imperial America.These collected essays record what Franzen calls 'a movement away from an angry and frightened isolation toward an acceptance – even a celebration – of being a reader and a writer.' They voice a wry distrust of the claims of technology and psychology, the love-hate relationship with consumerism, and the subversive belief in the tragic shape of the individual life that help make Franzen one of the sharpest, toughest-minded, and most entertaining social critics at work today.
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From the reviews of How to Be Alone:
‘Stunning … Each page is studded with irresistible writing which leaves you breathless for more. Franzen’s strength is his ability to combine a rigorous intellectual approach with an upbeat energy, using language which touches the heart as surely as the head’
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For six decades after Alois Alzheimer’s autopsy of Auguste D., even as breakthroughs in disease prevention and treatment were adding fifteen years to life expectancy in developed nations, Alzheimer’s continued to be viewed as a medical rarity à la Huntington’s disease. David Shenk tells the story of an American neuropathologist named Meta Naumann who, in the early fifties, autopsied the brains of 210 victims of senile dementia and found sclerotic arteries in few of them, plaques and tangles in the majority. Here was ironclad evidence that Alzheimer’s was far more common than anyone had guessed; but Naumann’s work appears to have persuaded no one. “They felt that Meta was talking nonsense,” her husband recalled.
The scientific community simply wasn’t ready to consider that senile dementia might be more than a natural consequence of aging. In the early fifties there was no self-conscious category of “seniors,” no explosion of Sun Belt retirement communities, no AARP, no Early Bird tradition at low-end restaurants; and scientific thinking reflected these social realities. Not until the seventies did conditions become ripe for a reinterpretation of senile dementia. By then, as Shenk says, “so many people were living so long that senility didn’t feel so normal or acceptable anymore.” Congress passed the Research on Aging Act in 1974, and established the National Institute on Aging, for which funding soon mushroomed. By the end of the eighties, at the crest of my annoyance with the clinical term and its sudden ubiquity, Alzheimer’s had achieved the same social and medical standing as heart disease or cancer—and had the research funding levels to show for it.
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