A cogent and detailed look at the realities of cancer care.
Insider insights on how to manage breast cancer treatment.
In 2011, Maker (College Reading with the Active Critical Thinking Method, 2000, etc.) wasn’t prepared to be diagnosed with breast cancer, which was discovered during a routine CT scan. Nor was she ready to navigate the numerous medical decisions that she now needed to make. Nevertheless, she dove into the process, independently researching mainstream treatments, side effects, and alternative therapies; pressing her doctors to answer her questions; and seeking out second, third, and fourth opinions on the best course of care. Her book is a valuable resource for anyone facing a diagnosis of breast cancer—or, indeed, any other serious health condition. In it, she offers tips on how to navigate confusing health care systems and find assistance from patient advocates and support groups. She also praises integrative oncologists who combine conventional treatments with alternative ones. Her deeply personal story offers a valuable example of a patient speaking up for her own needs and coordinating her own care, and she provides, in an appendix, a helpful list of questions to ask doctors. Later sections delve into her chemotherapy and radiation treatments in great detail. These are sometimes-engaging, as when she describes trying to find a way to save her hair and nails. However, they’re so specific to her unique experience that not all readers will find them useful. The final chapters address diet and other lifestyle changes, such as avoiding environmental toxins, that may help prevent cancer recurrence. Along the way, she also touches on topics such as “pinkwashing,” referring to corporations that support cancer-fighting charities for public relations purposes while manufacturing cancer-causing products. She ends with a compelling call for readers to focus more effort on cancer prevention.
A cogent and detailed look at the realities of cancer care.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9976619-0-3
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Jane Thomas Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2018
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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