A thorough, thoughtful resource for people facing a life-altering health situation.
An ALS patient offers advice for coping with a devastating illness.
Dunsky (Common Sense Is Not All That Common, 2015), a physician, has been living with ALS —amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease—for seven years. Once he accepted his diagnosis (not an easy process, as he admits), he set about learning as much as possible about his condition so that he could “live with ALS while maintaining as good a quality of life as possible.” Now, he’s sharing what he’s learned with others. The resulting book contains the kind of comprehensive, detailed information people facing a terminal illness need in order to make educated decisions about their treatment and care. In 75 short chapters he covers everything from the mechanisms of the disease to treatment options to decisions about end-of-life care, always maintaining a positive yet realistic tone. One of his first tasks is to reassure readers that an ALS diagnosis does not have to mean total disability is imminent, though “life will change dramatically as symptoms of weakness and paralysis advance.” With that in mind, Dunsky strongly recommends a proactive approach to disease management. Patients should inform themselves about the likely course of ALS, make decisions while they are still able to do so, and be willing to accept interventions, such as motorized wheelchairs or breathing devices, rather than resisting the need for assistance. He also goes into detail about the nitty-gritty issues that will affect people with ALS, from choosing comfortable clothing to finding the right bed. Dunsky is a doctor (though his specialty is unrelated to ALS), and occasionally his language might be a bit technical for a lay reader unfamiliar with terms like “neural cellular metabolism” and “neurotrophic factors,” which aren’t always adequately explained. And while his discussion of the financial aspects of managing an ALS diagnosis is welcome, more information for people who lack the means to make expensive renovations to their homes or afford high-end medical equipment would be useful. But those minor faults are more than balanced out by Dunsky’s sensitive, practical advice.
A thorough, thoughtful resource for people facing a life-altering health situation.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5349-8866-8
Page Count: 340
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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