'The Theft of Memory'

What is memory? If it’s the essence of a person’s identity, what happens when memory declines? Jonathan Kozol explores these questions in his new book, The Theft of Memory: Losing My Father, One Day at a Time. It’s an intimate portrait of his father, who had Alzheimer’s disease, and it’s all the more poignant because Dr. Harry Kozol was a psychiatrist who specialized in complicated neurological disorders. He treated playwright Eugene O’Neill, who had moved to Boston to be near him, and he provided psychiatric evaluations of the Boston Strangler and Patty Hearst. But this book is really about the relationship between father and son.