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 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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