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CANCERLAND

A MEDICAL MEMOIR

Illuminating reading on the legacy of a cancer authority.

Stories of loss and hope from distinguished Harvard oncologist Scadden.

Having spent much of his career on the cancer battlegrounds, the author writes with authority that cancer is an “immutable fact of life.” When Scadden was growing up in the 1950s, he was confused and traumatized by the cancer deaths of three people he knew. As a medical student at Case Western Reserve University, the author encountered his first patient cases, which prepared him for a livelihood built on a delicate combination of medical precision and compassionate humanity. Scadden shares poignant and moving anecdotes of his patients as a student earning a real-world medical education—e.g., learning about childbirth from a gracious pregnant woman or delivering a devastating prognosis to a lymphoma victim. The author’s account of the personal pain of watching his own parents navigate cancer treatments leads into a probing discussion on how far early formative therapies have evolved, including how his work with stem cell research has branched out to encompass a wide array of afflictions. Scadden effectively weaves in clinical information on viral growth, research studies from a variety of medical revolutionaries, dissections of the early misconceptions and physiological mechanics of cancer, and a timeline for the AIDS epidemic, which he believes “gave every doctor, nurse, therapist, or technician the chance to become a better caregiver.” As co-founder of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, Scadden is partly responsible for numerous medical breakthroughs through bone marrow stem cell research. He reminds readers that those dismal days of scant hope are gone and that the promise of modern technology and radical curative immunotherapies (including those he continues to develop) is making cancer a disease “that changes people’s lives, but [is] something they can speak of in past tense.” Lay readers may want to skirt around the book’s later chapters, laden with frequently complex medical jargon, to get to the heart and soul of Scadden’s passion.

Illuminating reading on the legacy of a cancer authority.

Pub Date: July 10, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-250-09275-5

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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