Sensitive and frank personal views on anxiety backed by substantial research and analysis of the evolution of treatment...
Anxiety and panic attacks plague a woman’s life.
A rapid heart rate, chest pains, and shallow breathing are all symptoms of a heart attack. However, for Wall Street Journal health reporter Petersen, those were the symptoms of her reoccurring anxiety attacks. As she notes, those are just a few of the many symptoms she and millions of others with anxiety disorders deal with on a regular basis. Having lived with anxiety for more 25 years, Petersen has been in and out of numerous emergency rooms, doctors’ offices, and therapy sessions, and she has tried a variety of drugs and alternative solutions to alleviate her condition, with mixed results. In this honest and revealing memoir, the author makes no attempt to mask the multiple ways that panic attacks have sideswiped her, forcing her to reschedule and rethink how she lives her life. Along with her personal memories of the past two decades, Petersen explores practical information about anxiety and panic attacks, the history and development of anti-anxiety drugs, the methods of therapy used to treat disorders, and the factors involved in the inheritance of genes that lead to the disorders. “The estimated number of people who will have at least one anxiety disorder during the course of their lives is staggering: one in three Americans ages thirteen or older,” writes the author. “If we look only at women, the number is even higher—more than 40 percent.” Based on these figures, Petersen’s thoughtful and encouraging treatise on living and thriving despite these disorders will be helpful reading for many, and her honesty opens a much-needed doorway onto a significant health problem that is often underreported but on the rise.
Sensitive and frank personal views on anxiety backed by substantial research and analysis of the evolution of treatment methods and drugs to alleviate symptoms.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-41857-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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