One Hundred Names for Love
A Memoir
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Published by: W. W. Norton & Company
Release Date: April 4, 2011
Pages: 336
ISBN13: 978-0393072419
OVERVIEW
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.
Add on GoodreadsPRAISE & ACCOLADES
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
Finalist for the National Book Circle Critics Award
"Ackerman’s writing about the brain is breathtaking; she paints a portrait of an eccentric and endearing marriage…She squares up her new normal so movingly that she hollowed out my chest…A splendid book.”
—The Plain Dealer
“One of the most beautiful biographies I’ve ever read.”
—The Columbian
"No other writer can blend science of the brain with love of language like Diane Ackerman. In this extraordinary memoir, she opens a window into the experience of wordlessness—the language paralysis called aphasia. In narrating the recovery of her wordsmith husband, Paul West, from a stroke that reduced his vast vocabulary to a single syllable, she evokes the joy and mystery of the brain’s ability to use and connect words. Deeply rewarding to the literary reader, while also offering advice and support to the families of those afflicted by stroke, Ackerman has given us a rich trifecta: a literary love story, accessible insight into the science and medicine of brain injury, and invaluable spiritual sustenance in the face of life’s myriad physical sufferings. A reviewer from The Columbian called it, “One of the most beautiful biographies I’ve ever read.”
"A testament to the power of creativity in language, life—and love."
—Heller McAlpin, Washington Post
"Two wordsmiths enthralled by the glimmering pleasures of the life of the mind have lived together in literary camaraderie for decades. So when novelist, memoirist, and critic Paul West was hit with a stroke in 2005 that left his brain scorched and his body battered, both he and his wife, Diane Ackerman, a poet and the lushly original author of such seismic books as The Zookeeper’s Wife (2007), had a lot to lose. But West never succumbed to his impaired vision, frozen right hand, or, most remarkably, bewildering and silencing global aphasia; and Ackerman, who by fortuitous prescience had conducted extensive neurological research for her book An Alchemy of Mind (2004), proved to be an ideal caregiver. Writing with her signature empathy, curiosity, brilliance, and mirth, Ackerman chronicles West’s heroic battle to reclaim words and mobility and her tailoring of West’s speech therapy to match his spectacular vocabulary and unique intelligence. A master of vivid metaphors and multifaceted narratives, Ackerman candidly addresses the profound demands facing caregivers while explaining the cruel consequences of aphasia, charting West’s against-all-odds return to conversing and writing (The Shadow Factory, 2008) and marveling over the healing powers of language and intimacy. A gorgeously engrossing, affecting, sweetly funny, and mind-opening love story of crisis, determination, creativity, and repair.
—Booklist, starred review
"This book has done what no other has for me in recent years: it has renewed my faith in the redemptive power of love, the need to give and get it unstintingly, to hold nothing back, settle for nothing less, because when flesh and being and even life fall away, love endures. This book is proof." — Abraham Verghese, New York Times Book Review
"[T]ouching…their journey makes for goofy, pun-happy reading, a little like overhearing lovers coo to each other."
― Publishers Weekly
"An intimate, richly documented, and beautiful memoir …. [A] double portrait of two remarkable people."
― Joyce Carol Oates
"Combine the brilliant sensibility of a poet and essayist with the compelling articulation of her mindful wisdom, and intense devotion, and voila―you have the powerful journey into the many ways love can inspire healing after profound brain damage. This gem of a book will captivate the many of us who have a relative or friend stricken by stroke―and will be of practical help to doctors and scientists as well as concerned family members. One Hundred Names for Love reminds us that healing is possible and that lives can be rebuilt from the inside out."
― Daniel Siegel, M.D.
"Diane Ackerman's most enjoyable, intimate, and heartrending work yet."
—Atul Gawande
“Moving… Ms. Ackerman won me over…intensely engaging… intimate.”
— Paula Span, New York Times’ Blog “The New Old Age”
“Finally, this is a story about Ackerman's love for West, a love beyond fathoming, and probably beyond words.”
— Seattle Times
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