KDL Recommends

One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing

ISBN: 039307241X

Title: One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing

Author: Diane Ackerman

KDL Description:

The author describes her husband’s stroke which resulted in aphasia, or loss of language, and how she used their love and scientific understanding of language to help him regain his use of words.

Amazon Description:

“Diane Ackerman’s most enjoyable, intimate, and heartrending work yet.”—Atul Gawande

Everyone who cherishes the gift of language will cherish Diane Ackerman’s narrative masterpiece, an exquisitely written love story and medical miracle story, one that combines science, inspiration, wisdom, and heart.

One day Ackerman’s husband, Paul West, an exceptionally gifted wordsmith and intellectual, suffered a terrible stroke. When he regained awareness he was afflicted with aphasia—loss of language—and could utter only a single syllable: “mem.” The standard therapies yielded little result but frustration. Diane soon found, however, that by harnessing their deep knowledge of each other and her scientific understanding of language and the brain she could guide Paul back to the world of words. This triumphant book is both a humane and revealing addition to the medical literature on stroke and aphasia and an exquisitely written love story: a magnificent addition to literature, period.