The Long Goodbye

Patti Davis, the daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, writes about losing her father to Alzheimer's disease, saying goodbye in stages, and watching a progression of a disease that steals what is most precious - a person's memory. Past and present come together in this illuminating portrait of grief, of a man, a disease and a girl and her father. Davis remembers herself as a child, holding her father's hand; and as a young woman whose hand is given away in marriage by her father...of her father teaching her to ride a bicycle, of the moment when he let her go and she went off on her own...She writes of her father's boyhood, of his years in Hollywood, keeping his dreams alive...of dealing with her father as President...and the toll of the disease itself.