Told with brutal clarity, this is a haunting testimony about death that is filled with life.
A passionate and eloquent memoir about one woman’s battle with breast cancer.
Award-winning poet and essayist Boyer (Creative Writing/Kansas City Art Institute; A Handbook of Disappointed Fate, 2018, etc.), a single mother living on a tight budget, was diagnosed with highly aggressive breast cancer when she was 41. Her doctor (who she later replaced) said her tumor was “necrotic, which meant that it was growing so quickly it failed to build infrastructure for itself.” He recommended chemotherapy right away. Her treatment with Neulasta cost $7,000 per shot. As the author writes, “someone once said that choosing chemotherapy is like choosing to jump off a building when someone is holding a gun to your head.” Boyer looked for guidance and inspiration from other women artists who suffered from the disease, including Susan Sontag, Alice James, Rachel Carson, Audre Lorde, Fanny Burney, Kathy Acker, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Boyer kept a journal, a “minor form of reparative magic,” which she abandoned hundreds of times. John Donne’s “sickbed masterpiece,” Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, written when he thought he was dying, casts an influential shadow over her book. Both have complex structures and are highly meditative, but Boyer’s “exercise in lamentation” is secular where Donne’s was religious. She takes us on a deeply personal journey into “my body in pain,” “eviscerating sadness,” and profound loss—eyelashes, eyebrows, toenails, nerves, brain cells, her hair. “I like wigs,” she writes. “I wear wigs. People I like wear wigs. Dolly Parton wears wigs….Medusa wore a wig made of snakes.” Eventually, Boyer had a double mastectomy. “In the capitalist medical universe in which all bodies must orbit around profit at all times,” she writes, “even a double mastectomy is considered an outpatient procedure.” She learned that everyone lies, from pharmaceutical companies to doctors and researchers and the internet. “Now that I am undying,” she writes, “the world is full of possibility.”
Told with brutal clarity, this is a haunting testimony about death that is filled with life.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-27934-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
A touching portrait of a complex and tortured soul, written by his brother. Abbie Hoffman, one of the best-known radicals of the 1960s, kept in almost daily contact with his kid brother, Jack, even during his days of hiding as a fugitive. With the help of Four Walls Eight Windows copublisher Simon, Jack now chronicles their relationship and his brother's life. From humble Russian-Jewish origins, they were the sons of a long-suffering father, whom they compared to Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, and a mother best described as eccentric. Experimenting with drugs and gradually becoming politicized, Abbie joined SNCC in 1964 and helped raise funds for their Freedom Summer efforts. Later he founded the Youth International Party (the Yippies) with Jerry Rubin and organized the protests against the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. He established himself as the clown prince of the counterculture, writing Revolution for the Hell of It and Steal This Book. The humor with which he approached the Chicago 7 conspiracy trial and his appearance before HUAC is vividly depicted. His continuing drug use and experimentation led to his arrest in 1973 on cocaine charges. Abbie went underground for almost seven years. Hiding first in Mexico, he later returned to the US, living in upstate New York under the alias Barry Freed. Unable to stay out of politics, he became a noted environmental activist. He also battled manic-depression. In 1980, he reemerged and surrendered to authorities; after about a year in prison, he was paroled. He became increasingly depressed, however, and drugs and alcohol only compounded the problem. He took his own life in 1989. These events are well known, and Jack Hoffman is curiously removed from the story he tells. He elaborates little, if at all, on how it felt to be the younger brother of such a notorious figure, as if he were still content to remain in Abbie's lingering shadow. Nevertheless, this is the forceful story of an American original.
Pub Date: Sept. 21, 1994
ISBN: 0-87477-760-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
In this bafflingly disappointing autobiography, Kunstler, radical lawyer extraordinaire, is once again arguing a difficult case—this time his own. As defense attorney in some of this country's highest profile political courtroom dramas, throughout his astounding career (he's now 75) Kunstler has chosen to champion political causes rather than people—causes that were often very unpopular (he's currently representing Colin Ferguson, charged with murder on the Long Island Railroad). His rallying cry is the defense of the underdog, those he feels are most rejected by society and who therefore risk missing out on that all-American right: a good defense. But his hard-hitting remarks here (written with Isenberg, Women Who Love Men Who Kill, 1991) about the corruption and racism of the American judiciary get drowned in dry, criminally uniformative narrative that belies the passion it is intended to convey. Instead of offering us a unique view of cases involving Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies, Martin Luther King, and others, we get empty apologies for a childhood appreciation of ``Amos 'n' Andy'' and compulsive philandering during his many travels. He intriguingly calls the Kennedys ``dangerous,'' but presents no further explanation, and his criticism of another leftie lawyer, former NAACP director Jack Greenberg (Crusaders in the Courts, p. 363) smacks of petty in- fighting. Kunstler's career has followed the political times: Earlier in his career he considered any situation in which a black man shot a white cop to be a political case; today he finds himself rushing to defend Arabs (i.e., the World Trade Center bombing case). Though he gives an interesting if idiosyncratic introduction to legal politics, Kunstler seems primarily obsessed with his outsider status; he needs to prove that he is hip and sexy despite his briefcase. One would have hoped for more from a man who has stood up for justice in courtrooms often determined to undermine it.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-55972-265-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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