In 2010, when she was 25 years old, Dasha Kiper abandoned her pursuit of a PhD in clinical psychology to move in with a man she calls Mr. Kessler, a 98-year-old Holocaust survivor who was succumbing to Alzheimer's. Kiper did this, she writes, not only because she felt alienated by academia, but because she was inspired by the work of the physicianwriter Oliver Sacks. Her new book, Travelers to Unimaginable Lands, is an homage to Sacks, one that self-consciously emulates his blending of clinical case study with medical and literaryphilosophical meditations in an attempt to explain why the human brain is so ill-equipped to care for patients with dementia.
Kiper doesn't have the vast storehouse of clinical experience
