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
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
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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