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
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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