Books by Cindy Weinstein

The Scarlet Letter (Oxford World's Classics)

by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Cindy Weinstein

"Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me." With these chilling words a husband claims his wife after a two-year absence. But the child she clutches is not his, and Hester wears a scarlet "A" upon her breast, the sign of adultery visible to all. Under an assumed name, her husband begins his vindictive search for her lover, determined to expose what Hester is equally determined to protect. Defiant and proud, Hester witnesses the degradation of two very different men, as moral codes and legal imperatives painfully collide. Set in the Puritan community of seventeenth-century Boston, The Scarlet Letter also sheds light on the nineteenth century in which it was written, as Hawthorne explores his ambivalent relations with his Puritan forebears. The text of this edition is taken from the Centenary Edition of Hawthorne's works, the most authoritative critical edition. It includes a new, wide-ranging introduction that sheds light on the novel's autobiographical, historical, and literary contexts, a comprehensive and up-to-date bibliography, and thorough notes that provide essential information on Puritan and nineteenth-century life.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Finding the Right Words A Story of Literature, Grief, and the Brain

by Cindy Weinstein, Bruce L. Miller

The moving story of an English professor studying neurology in order to understand and come to terms with her father's death from Alzheimer's.

Winner of the Memoir Prize for Books by the Memoir Magazine

In 1985, when Cindy Weinstein was a graduate student at UC Berkeley, her beloved father, Jerry, was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease. He was fifty-eight years old. Twelve years later, at age seventy, he died having lost all of his memories—along with his ability to read, write, and speak.

Finding the Right Words follows Weinstein's decades-long journey to come to terms with her father's dementia as both a daughter and an English professor. Although her lifelong love of language and literature gave her a way to talk about her grief, she realized that she also needed to learn more about the science of dementia to make sense of her father's death. To write her story, she collaborated with Dr. Bruce L. Miller, neurologist and director of the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco, combining personal memoir, literature, and the science and history of brain health into a unique, educational, and meditative work.

Finding the Right Words is an invaluable guide for families dealing with a life-changing diagnosis. In chapters of profound and sometimes humorous remembrance, Weinstein relies on literature to describe the shock of her father's diagnosis and his loss of language and identity. Writing in response to Weinstein's deeply personal narrative, Dr. Miller describes the neurological processes responsible for the symptoms displayed by her father. He also reflects upon his own personal and professional experiences. In a final chapter about memory, Weinstein is able to remember her father before the diagnosis, and Miller explains how the brain creates memories while sharing some of his own. Their two perspectives give readers a fuller understanding of Alzheimer's than any one voice could.