Inspiring, instructive memoir for cancer patients and their loved ones.
In this debut memoir developed from her blog, a California attorney shares her transformative journey following a midlife cancer diagnosis.
In 2011, Mock’s life was humming. A successful San Francisco lawyer, she was enjoying her “midlife crisis convertible,” her 50th birthday gift to herself, and studying Italian to further enjoy her trips abroad. Then she got a curveball: a little lump on her neck led to a diagnosis of stage 4 ovarian cancer. The news was a game-changer: some friends disappeared, and her relationship with girlfriend Andrea eventually fell apart. Mock started a blog (from which this book is developed) to share her emotions and experiences, particularly her determination to battle and live beyond her illness. While undergoing a hysterectomy and many rounds of chemo, Mock avoided Internet research, encased her head in deep-freeze “Penguin Caps” to prevent hair loss, and regularly exercised. She emerged from her treatment with clear medical scans and a fresh perspective, with work/life balance a new priority. She participated in LiveStrong biking events (despite mixed emotions about Lance Armstrong) and, best of all, met beautiful, supportive Carole, who soon became her wife. Today, Mock continues to have worries—including a 2013 spike in abnormal scans—but she decided “to pursue joy, not gloom,” fully aware that “staying true to the wisdom gained from having cancer is an ongoing process.” Mock wrote this lively, motivating memoir from the cancer trenches, providing many black-and-white photos of herself that reflect her philosophy of bringing positive energy to a cancer diagnosis. She offers numerous examples of such behavior not only in her own actions, but from those around her, including from her Italian teacher; the book’s title comes from an English translation of the latter’s remark, “Non tutto il male viene per nuocere.” While some readers may question Mock’s emphasis on exercise to battle disease, she discusses this idea within the context of describing her entire course of care.
Inspiring, instructive memoir for cancer patients and their loved ones.Pub Date: July 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-49-176708-5
Page Count: 186
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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