Book of the Week!

We are honored--and thrilled--to announce that our book, A Caregivers Guide to Lewy Body Dementia, was named Book of the Week by Alzheimer’s Weekly and Dementia Weekly, a well-known blog, on May 19^th. We believe that book has helped many people but it is always rewarding when others recognize that.

The Guide isn’t our first book about Lewy body dementia. The first one was Riding a Rollercoaster with Lewy Body Dementia. It came about after we’d been teaching about LBD for a few years. I’d already had one book published and was working on another. (Incidentally, the book I was working on is STILL unfinished—other’s keep getting in the way!) We had the information from Jim’s experiences and from the teaching we’d been doing in care facilites. It was just a matter of putting it together.

We did that and came up with Riding a Rollercoaster with Lewy Body Dementia, a book directed to entry level care staff--the people who do the hands-on care of our loved ones in residential care. We printed, bound and distributed it ourselves. We put it on our website and did 17 free presentations that summer to sell the book. We sold 500 copies the first year and people still ask for it occasionally. Just recently a caregiver commented that he had both books, but he liked the Rollercoaster best because it’s comb binding allowed him to lay it out flat so that making notes in it was easier. “I have notes and bookmarks all through it,” he explained. Presently, the Rollercoaster is available to care staff as part of a staff training package.

It was my writer’s group, and Ginger Fleishens, especially, that made the Guide happen. They’d been with us through the writing of the Rollercoaster and she insisted we should submit it the book to publishers. “It’s needed, and the time is right,” she said. That was true. There were as yet no non-scientific (i.e., books written for the everyday person) books about LBD on the market. We submitted our manuscript to several publishers. Noreen, of Demos Medical Publishing was interested, but only if we changed the focus of our book. “Care staff don’t buy books,” she said. “Family caregivers do.” We knew she was right. It was the caregivers who had bought most of the Rollercoaster books, not the care staff.

We were a little disappointed; we felt like we were preaching to the choir. Caregivers already knew much of what we wrote about and many of them had horror stories about how care staff did not know about or understand LBD. That had been the audience we wanted to reach. But we bowed to Noreen’s knowledge and rewrote the book. A year later A Caregiver’s Guide to Lewy Body Dementia was born. It has been a best seller on Amazon since it was published in 2010 and received the Caregiver Friendly Award from Today's Caregiver Magazine in 2012. Now we are please to add Alzheimer’s Weekly and Dementia Weekly’s “Book of the Week” to our list of honors.

Our third book about LBD, Managing Cognitive Issues in Parkinson’s and Other Lewy Body Disorders will soon be available. I’ll talk about it in a future blog.

A Caregiver's Guide to Lewy Body Dementia is available at LBDtools.com