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
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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