by Catherine Guthrie ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
Filled with great openness and sincerity, the book adds an original and colorful layer to the pink-ribbon world of breast...
A women’s health journalist chronicles her two bouts with breast cancer.
“I knew a thing or two about breast lumps,” writes Guthrie early on. “I was a magazine journalist, and women’s health was my specialty. Writing about breast cancer was my bread and butter: how to prevent it, how to detect it, how to survive it, how to talk to your best friend about it. Risk factors, statistics, and treatment options rattled off my tongue at the slightest provocation.” So it felt unreal when she discovered a jagged lump on her breast, just above a small mole. A mammogram and biopsy revealed cancer, plunging Guthrie into the unexpected role of patient. Even though she had observed numerous women in this scenario, she was totally unprepared for her own entry into the world of breast cancer. With honesty and a touch of humor, the author shares her experiences, tracing the many contours of her struggles, from her diagnosis to double mastectomy to her decision about reconstructive surgery. She details the horror at having the actual lump missed during surgery, her anger at the surgeon, and how her drug treatment failed her as well. She shares the fears, disappointments, and confusion she felt, despite her knowledge about this particular form of cancer, and how she eventually embraced her new body. She includes touching moments with her partner and how, together, they navigated the often confusing medical world and the transition from healthy to sick and back. In a world where 1 in 8 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer, Guthrie’s memoir is useful, instructive reading for anyone entering this sisterhood or caretaking a friend or family member with this disease.
Filled with great openness and sincerity, the book adds an original and colorful layer to the pink-ribbon world of breast cancer.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5107-3291-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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