Floyd Skloot

When memories fade, can one ever really return home?

When Beverly and I got together in 1992, and I moved to be with her in the little round house she'd built in the middle of 20 acres of woods near Amity, I found myself immersed in a natural setting that I responded to with all my being.

Through his long, productive career, Paul Theroux has mixed nonfiction books about exotic travel with novels set in exotic places. Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, Honduras - he lives in and writes about places most of us never see.

A new laboratory technique, positron emission tomography, uses radioactively labeled oxygen or glucose that essentially lights up specific and different areas of the brain being activated when a person speaks words or sees words or hears words, revealing the organic location for areas of behavioral malfunction.

In the spring of 1993, I married Beverly and moved to the woods. This is something I could never have imagined myself doing.

I became demented overnight. Sudden onset is one factor that distinguishes my form of dementia from the more common form associated with Alzheimer's disease.

The Art Student's War' is, at its core, a traditional American wartime love story. As such, it is timely and engrossing. By the end, all its principal characters 'have been to Hell and back.'

I feel that I'm a poet first. Not only was poetry the first genre in which I wrote, it's the genre that serves as the basis for my practice as a writer.

For those who turn to literary biography for salacious details, 'Flannery' will disappoint. It is the biography of someone who had very little chance to live in the conventional sense, to experience events.

At 93, so deep in dementia that she didn't remember any details of her life, my mother somehow still knew songs.

Flannery O'Connor's brief life and slim output were nonetheless marked by piercing powers of observation.

Dementia resembles delirium in the same way an ultra-marathon resembles a dash across the street. Same basic components, vastly different scale. If you've run delirium's course once or twice in your life, try to imagine a version that never ends.