A dignified, intensely personal journey of survival.
A two-year ordeal with breast cancer conveyed with frank prose and stunning photography.
A Southern California–based palliative care nurse, Jacobs’ blog, The Silver Pen, evolved into an online diary immortalizing her thoughts and feelings after a grim diagnosis in 2010. Originally begun as a way to avoid personal interaction yet still update concerned friends, the blog went viral. It also reiterated the hard truth that cancer is an equal-opportunity affliction, since the author considered herself a “healthy, happy, vegan-eating, marathon-running thirty-nine-year-old with no family history of breast cancer.” As a caregiver and social worker, Jacobs unexpectedly found herself “on the opposite side of the bed,” and her candid chronicle doesn’t spare or sugarcoat the details about how blindsiding cancer proved to be, with numerous biopsies, surgeries, grueling chemotherapy and radiation treatments, and their attendant side effects. Jacobs’ narrative voice is firm, gently authoritative, yet comfortably good-natured as she addresses the challenges of delivering the news to children, post-treatment reintroduction to everyday life, vital nutrition advice, and the unlimited virtues of having levelheaded, supportive friends and family throughout the process. Her compassionate guidebook—something Jacobs admits she longed for during her own treatment—provides perhaps the most important advice in sections called “Practical Matters,” which address key clinical details about managing the entire patient experience. Award-winning photographer Messina beautifully captures the essence of Jacobs’ journey, delivering mood and emotion through gorgeous imagery. Throughout it all, Jacobs remained resilient, buoyed by a holistic approach to wellness. This is a wise investment for women newly diagnosed with breast cancer or simply interested in how the process works. Unfailingly optimistic, Jacobs compassionately offers proof positive that even a terrifying, arduous disease like cancer can have a silver lining.
A dignified, intensely personal journey of survival.Pub Date: March 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4371-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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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