Intimate, firsthand accounts and in-depth yoga instruction that will offer comfort to cancer patients.
In this memoir and guidebook, a breast cancer survivor shares her struggle and discusses the role that yoga played in her recovery.
In the fall of 2006, when Kahn was 45, she received the diagnosis that few people are prepared for: “you have cancer.” She was an Army wife, a fitness instructor, and the mother of a boy in sixth grade and a girl in 10th—and now, she was afraid that she would become only “Cancer Cathleen.” Facing surgery, chemotherapy, and the loneliness of her diagnosis, she managed to find new strength through her ongoing practice of yoga, which also helped her to connect with other people. Kahn’s debut is also a self-help manual for readers with cancer who also hope to use yoga to support their health. As a trained yoga instructor and wellness expert, she offers readers poses and meditations for specific cancer-treatment side effects, such as nausea, constipation, sleeplessness, the mental fog known as “chemo brain,” and other ailments. She also provides positive affirmations to help battle stress, anxiety, and depression. She presents all of these instructions in a highly accessible manner, complete with clear illustrations by Coyle, leaving room for readers to make notes on their impressions and progress. She talks about her own experiences with breast cancer in an appealingly forthright manner, and her recollections are both heartfelt and informative throughout. Some address experiences that no one warned her about, such as the pain of a dye injection, the itchiness of wigs, and numerous awkward comments and questions from others. Although Kahn notes that she has an increased appreciation of the world and her health due to her greater focus on mindfulness, she also stresses that yoga isn’t a magic bullet and that close family relationships are also important for one’s personal health.
Intimate, firsthand accounts and in-depth yoga instruction that will offer comfort to cancer patients.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-982216-32-0
Page Count: 282
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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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