Boyd Davis, Alzheimer talk, text and context: Enhancing
communication. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
I picked up Boyd Davis's edited volume with some anxiety. I had
let go of my Alzheimer's research for a number of painful reasons in
graduate school and had, over the past 10 years, invented myself in the
sociopolitics of language learning and teaching. When I spotted the volume
at a book exhibit, I thought: Would I be able to connect to any of the
work anymore? A lot of research ground gets covered in a decade; would I
be able to pick up any of the conversational threads? When a couple of
months later the editor of Language and Society contacted me
about possibly reviewing it, I took it as a sign beckoning and inviting me
back to that space. Needless to say, I was delighted at the array of
readings. The volume covers a range from personal accounts (by Jeutonne
Brewer), to issues of identity, personhood maintenance, and gender (D.
Shenk; E. B. Ryan K. Byrne, H. Spykerman & J. B.Orange; C. Pope &
D. N. Ripich), to discourse markers, lexical variation, and bilingualism
(Davis, M. Maclagan & P. Mason, Davis & C Bernstein, G. M. J.
Nold), to concerns relating to caregiver training (K. Byrne & J. B.
Orange; Ryan, Spykerman & A. P. Anas; N. Green; and L. Russell-Pinson
& L. Moore) and metaphors by which language and Alzheimer's
research can be described (H. E. Hamilton). Each of these areas laminates
Alzheimer's talk with feeling and care, thus countering the
sedimented psycholinguistic tropes that have typically written about
Alzheimer discourse in clinical and cold ways.