Kozol writes of his dad's Alzheimer's

There's no shortage of books that deal with the topic of Alzheimer's, each wrenching in its own way, as the descent into murkiness is described by people who have watched loved ones succumb.

The Theft of Memory (**1/2 out of four) is told from a son's perspective. Jonathan Kozol (Amazing Grace) describes the pleasure that can come from extracting tiny moments of joy from the smallest gifts of responsiveness a patient can offer. And he talks about the importance of pulling out and polishing up memories of the long-lost days of simple engagement.

Kozol's father, a respected neurologist and psychiatrist, knew sooner than anyone else what was happening to his brain, and the implications. Harry Kozol told no one but his son.

As the old man grew increasingly unpredictable and disoriented, and it became clear his elderly wife was incapable of caring for him, the decision was made to place him in a facility. He emerged often enough from his misty passivity to ask to go home that his son concluded — years later, after the couple's retirement funds were depleted — that he must acquiesce, and hired helpers so it could happen.

With his father's permission, Kozol spent hours poring over the man's old files, learning details he hadn't known about the doctor's patients, including playwright Eugene O'Neill, and the criminal-case evaluations he had conducted, including those of Boston Strangler Albert DeSalvo and rich-girl-turned-bank-robber Patty Hearst. Pieces of his father's history began to slide into place; some took on new meaning.

This literary approach, though interesting, isn't seamlessly constructed. The first half of TheTheft of Memory deals primarily with the pain, struggles and accommodations made in the months and years after Alzheimer's exacted its pernicious toll.

Only hints are given about Harry Kozol's rather extraordinary earlier years, his relationships with his son and his wife, and the texture and tempo of the life he once had. Perhaps that was an effort by the author to present the Everyman nature of this hideous disease — that the progression of Alzheimer's is always relentless, families are always torn up, memories are always annihilated, and it doesn't matter if the person is famous in his field or strong of constitution. But it feels disjointed.

And because we learn too little until near the end of the book about the specifics of the man and his career, and the difficulties over the years between father and son, the connection and empathy one normally expects to feel when reading a memoir of this sort doesn't really take wing.

And yet, there are moments of almost poetic luminosity. Such as this: "...in his long and brave and dignified resistance to the darkness that progressively encircled him, there was, for me, no diminution — not in the essence of the person he had been, not in the admiration that I felt for him. This is why it was so hard to let him go."

The Theft of Memory: Losing My Father, One Day at a Time

By Jonathan Kozol

Crown, 320 pp.

2.5 stars out of four

Sharon Peters is author of Trusting Calvin: How a Dog Helped Heal A Holocaust Survivor's Heart.