Robert Kolker

Yes.

Lost Girls by Robert Kolker, published in 2013.

This is the story of the Long Island serial killer, or LISK.

In May 2010, an escort named Shannan Gilbert disappeared after fleeing a client's house in a gated community in Oak Beach, Long Island.

It is out now.

Next up is The Vanishing Family by Robert Kolker.

This is a book I actually just finished and decided to reread because of how important the topics in this book are, not just to me, but to so many people I know and love.

This is a book from this list that has stayed with me the most.

The Vanishing Family: Love, Fate, and the Quest to End Dementia is Robert Kolker's follow-up to Hidden Valley Road.

Kolker returns to something he does exceptionally well, taking an incredibly complicated area of medical science and allowing us to understand it through one family.

This time, the disease is frontotemporal dementia, or FTD.

Yikes.

Head to wnyc.org/getlit for more information.

That's the plan, so let's get started today with today's book conversation with author Robert Kolker and The Vanishing Family.

[upbeat music]

If there was a test that could tell you in your youth, maybe 10 or 20 years down the road, you had developed a rare form of dementia and that there was no cure, would you want to know? That's the question that faced a group of nine siblings.

Members of the family with successful careers and loving families were suddenly someone else.

But research into FTD might help find a cure for other neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's.

This story is the subject of journalist Robert Kolker's new book.

It's titled The Vanishing Family: Love, Fate, and the Quest to End Dementia.

It's about a rollicking send-up of Black mega-churches.

Tomorrow, we'll be speaking with Robert Kolker about a devastating medical mystery around dementia.

It's called The Vanishing Family.

And on Wednesday, we'll speak with Adan Giridharas.

The Karaoke Test and the Vanishing Self.

It's written by Robert Kolker.

As frontotemporal dementia degrades social awareness, loved ones and neuroscientists confront the heartbreaking boundary between a changing mind and the enduring self.

In the mid-2000s, A team of graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, conducted an unusual experiment.

And yes, it withers away.

But it may never vanish completely.

This essay was adapted from The Vanishing Family Love, Fate, and Quest to End Dementia by Robert Kolker, the author.

Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House.

So, yeah.

Tell me about The Vanishing Family by Robert Kolker.

So he wrote Hidden Valley Road a few years ago, which was quite popular.

So he seems to find these families who just have very interesting and sad things happening in their families and kind of reporting on them.