A tragic but ultimately hopeful story.
A compelling account of why psychologist Reibstein (Sexual Arrangements, 1993) chose in her 40s to have a double mastectomy in order to prevent breast cancer.
The author’s mother and two maternal aunts all died of breast cancer diagnosed when they were 50 or younger. Fannie, the middle Smith sister, was only 32 when she faced radical mastectomy and radiation, slash-and-burn treatments that offered only a reprieve, not a cure. Reibstein's mother, Regina, was next, and although she demanded more information and alternatives, she too ended up having a mastectomy and radiation therapy. Her prognosis was nevertheless good, and Regina returned to her four children and a rewarding job. Then, at 50, oldest sister Mary was diagnosed with cancer too far advanced for surgery or anything else; she died soon after. Regina confronted a lump in her other breast ten years later and finally succumbed. What made the sisters’ ordeals even more difficult was the secrecy and shame that surrounded their disease in the mid-20th century. Doctors were paternalistic but uninformative; the Bettys Ford and Rollins had not yet publicly written about what cancer is like for a woman; there weren’t any support groups to offer even such simple tips as how to adjust a prosthetic bra. Although genetic predisposition seemed clearly to be a factor, it was only after a first cousin, Fannie's daughter, also died of breast cancer that Reibstein acknowledged the almost certain risk she faced in view of her family history and gathered the courage to have a preventive double mastectomy. What keeps this from being mere medical melodrama is the author’s warm, meticulous reconstruction of her relatives’ lives, including her tangled relationship with her beloved mother. Also, as Reibstein reminds us, a quarter-century ago women diagnosed with breast cancer faced almost certain death, but today “breast cancer is not all-powerful. It does not have to be a killer.”
A tragic but ultimately hopeful story.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-58234-266-0
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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