Still Alice Book Review

The book that I chose to read for this class was Still Alice by Lisa Genova. The reason that I chose to read this book out of all three of our choices was because a movie is actually currently in production called Still Alice which is based directly off this book. I was actually quite surprised to learn that this was Genova’s first book because it is so well written.
Book Review:
To start off, this book is about an older woman named Alice Howland who is professor at the prestigious Harvard University. All starts going south for Alice once she goes on that jog and ends up losing her way. This is just one of her first signs of early Alzheimer’s because around the same time, she ends up losing her blackberry as well. These difficulties in memory all start progressing and getting worse and Alice having experience in the field of psychology, knows that something is not right. Alice thought that her memory problems were because of menopause, she even goes as …show more content…
I feel it has opened my eyes to an extent about the disease, however I like to believe that I was open minded about the disease before. I never thought that I really had a good grasp on what exactly the disease was and the symptoms. My perspective on the disease prior to this was simply all the stereotypes you hear about. I thought schizophrenia was just hallucinations and people going crazy and becoming violent, however, I did think that every case was different. Reading about Alice and how her life, once diagnosed with early onset schizophrenia, took a turn for the worst. In most cases of schizophrenia that I have heard of only really involved the patient and not as much about how it has an effect on the family as well. Reading about the sacrifices that John is facing because of this and how the children are affected is depressing to me. It is nice to see that the family is sticking it out and doing the best they can to not beat but at least tame this