A unique angle on a city popular with tourists This stunning black and white photographic book takes us on a journey through the forgotten backstreets and hidden neighborhoods of Bangkok revealing the fragile beauty and faded charm of the city that is about to disappear forever beneath a tidal wave of development. From the splendid Old Customs House perched on the banks of the Chao Phraya river to the vibrant communities of Chinatown and sleepy canals lost in time, it evokes a city that despite successive waves of modernization still boasts an extraordinarily rich and diverse cultural heritage.

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice An essential book for those coping with Alzheimer’s and other cognitive disorders that “reframe[s] our understanding of dementia with sensitivity and accuracy . . . to grant better futures to our loved ones and ourselves” (The New York Times). An estimated fifty million people in the world suffer from dementia. Diseases such as Alzheimer's erase parts of one's memory but are also often said to erase the self. People don't simply die from such diseases; they are imagined, in the clichés of our era, as vanishing in plain sight, fading away, or enduring a long goodbye. In On Vanishing, Lynn Casteel Harper, a Baptist minister and nursing home chaplain, investigates the myths and metaphors surrounding dementia and aging, addressing not only the indignities caused by the condition but also by the rhetoric surrounding it. Harper asks essential questions about the nature of our outsized fear of dementia, the stigma this fear may create, and what it might mean for us all to try to “vanish well.” Weaving together personal stories with theology, history, philosophy, literature, and science, Harper confronts our elemental fears of disappearance and death, drawing on her own experiences with people with dementia both in the American healthcare system and within her own family. In the course of unpacking her own stories and encounters—of leading a prayer group on a dementia unit; of meeting individuals dismissed as “already gone” and finding them still possessed of complex, vital inner lives; of witnessing her grandfather’s final years with Alzheimer’s and discovering her own heightened genetic risk of succumbing to the disease—Harper engages in an exploration of dementia that is unlike anything written before on the subject. A rich and startling work of nonfiction, On Vanishing reveals cognitive change as it truly is, an essential aspect of what it means to be mortal.

The poetry of travels in Southeast Asia. In My Lai, she writes: "We walk / to the museum cordoned by eyes / of farmers who live in road dust as did the dead. My eyes, not meeting / theirs, follow a man, middle-aged now, / once an eighteen-year-old Grunt, and our / woman guide, once a survivor at age six." By the author of A Sense of Direction.