Heartfelt advice for cancer patients, though the embrace of out-of-the-box healing methods may have a limited appeal.
A cancer survivor offers an alternative approach to overcoming disease.
When Meer (The Story of the Strange Sandwich, 2012, etc.) was diagnosed with cancer (what type is never specified), she was already struggling with personal and professional problems. A serious illness was the last thing she needed, but after the initial shock, she decided that healing would begin in her mind. “I am going to believe I am well. And if I believe I am well, I will be well,” she recalls telling her doctor. This unconventional outlook informs her approach to treatment and the advice she offers to readers on their own journeys to wellness. Meer begins by advocating that people slow down and consider their options, suggesting meditation and diet changes as first steps before more invasive treatments. “Give up sugar. It is EVIL” is typical of her emphatic recommendations, which are largely based on her personal experience. Some of the advice seems fairly sound, like bouncing on a trampoline to promote lymphatic drainage. Other tips may raise eyebrows, at least for those who usually put their faith in allopathic medicine. Cleanses, a strict plant-focused diet, and a cocktail of supplements (which she confesses to spending $1,500 per month on during her illness) all have the potential to help “cure” cancer, according to the author. Though Meer did receive chemotherapy, she stopped before completing treatment and is frank about her negative experiences with Western medicine. There’s also practical information on coping with finances while sick, the best beauty products for cancer patients, and thoughts on dating after a diagnosis. The guide’s tone is friendly and often funny, and fellow cancer patients should appreciate Meer’s tell-it-like-it-is attitude and her counsel to advocate for themselves and choose treatments that work for them. But more information on how to integrate alternative and traditional medicine would have been helpful for those who wish to combine both approaches. And some readers will likely disagree with Meer’s “look on the bright side” attitude. Though she admits some may find the idea “disgustingly Pollyanna,” her belief is that “major illnesses…show up to heal your life.”
Heartfelt advice for cancer patients, though the embrace of out-of-the-box healing methods may have a limited appeal.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9985821-9-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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