New in Paperback

In sickness and in health.

FINDING LIFE IN THE LAND OF ALZHEIMER'S One Daughter's Hopeful Story By Lauren Kessler | Penguin. 260 pp. $14

After losing her mother to Alzheimer's, Lauren Kessler was wracked with guilt. "I cared but not from that visceral place where love is," she recalls of her feelings during her mother's illness. Seeking penance and a greater understanding of the disease, she took a low-level position at an Alzheimer's care facility near her home in Oregon. There, for minimum wage, she bathed and diapered residents who were confused, fragile and a constant reminder of her own failures. Over time, though, she formed bonds with them, and a job she had planned to keep for two weeks became her world.

Kessler's account of her experience, Finding Life in the Land of Alzheimer's (published in hardcover as Dancing With Rose), offers an unsparing look at the disease and the people it affects. The author of several other nonfiction books, including Clever Girl, Kessler is at times an unsympathetic narrator, especially in the passages about her relationship with her mother. But the portraits she draws of those in her care are heartfelt, revealing an empathy she was unable to conjure when the disease struck her own family. "There's a way of looking at Alzheimer's that is not about decline and loss but is instead about movement from the worldly to the spiritual," she comments. In this book she comes close to achieving that.

THE INVISIBLE CURE Why We Are Losing the Fight Against AIDS in Africa By Helen Epstein | Picador. 324 pp. $16

In the early 1990s, Helen Epstein, an idealistic molecular biologist, abandoned her work "studying the sexual organs of a tiny insect the size of the letter I in ELIZABETH on an English penny" and headed for Uganda to devote herself to a more tangible goal: developing an AIDS vaccine. Her results, she writes, "were disappointing." Unfazed, Epstein changed her focus to public health, specifically the cultural, sociological and economic factors that contribute to the spread of AIDS in southern Africa. Ever a skeptic, Epstein set out to find answers on her own, meeting with doctors, other aid workers and, most important, Africans themselves.

In The Invisible Cure she recounts her discoveries with clarity and conviction. The tone and scope of the book are scholarly but lightened by Epstein's eloquent writing style and her ability to explain abstract scientific concepts in plain English. As its subtitle suggests, the book is also a critique of AIDS policies that don't take into account African mores and a call for more "initiatives that are truly locally conceived and controlled." At the heart of her case lies a philosophical shift: "Most of us see only Africa's contours, and we use them to map out problems of our own," she writes, but "you must enter a different world, follow its logic, and forget your own."

From Our Previous Reviews

· Set on Cape Cod, The Maytrees (Harper Perennial, $13.95), by Annie Dillard, "transpires among a circle of people who live there through all weather over decades," wrote Marilynne Robinson, who described the novel as "a highly localized meditation on the question, Why are we here?"

· Patricia Wood's Lottery (Berkeley, $14) is an "underdog novel" about a young man with a low IQ but "the wisdom of Solomon and the heart of a lion," commented Carrie Brown.

· In her memoir Warm Springs (Mariner, $13.95), Susan Richards Shreve puts "into extraordinary words" her childhood experience recovering from polio at the Warm Springs sanitarium in Georgia, noted Carolyn See.

· Ryszard Kapuscinski, a former correspondent for the Polish News Agency, "was a character right out of a Graham Greene novel," Tahir Shah wrote, calling Travels With Herodotus (Vintage, $14.95), a posthumously published account of Kapuscinski's early years in the field, "a work of art."

· Jean Edward Smith's biography FDR (Random House, $20) "is at once a careful, intelligent synopsis of the existing Roosevelt scholarship . . . and a meticulous re-interpretation of the man and his record," according to Jonathan Yardley.

· All on Fire (Norton, $18.95), by Henry Mayer, a study of the life and times of abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison, is back in print. Michael R. Winston called the book, first published in 1998, "a brilliant narrative history of the United States between 1800 and 1865."

Nora Krug is a regular contributor to Book World.