A stirring, inspiring account of one couple’s story of surviving cancer.
An intimate, thoughtful look at one couple’s journey through pancreatic cancer and recovery.
In Guidara’s debut memoir, she chronicles a painful and inspiring year with her husband, Frank. Her book begins when the couple receives Frank’s diagnosis just prior to their first wedding anniversary. When Frank turned yellow and a gallstone was ruled out, it turned out he had pancreatic cancer, one of the rarest and deadliest forms of the disease. The chance of his living five years was 5.4 percent. Guidara became fiercely convinced that if Frank listened to his body and treated it with respect, it would keep him alive. Frank himself never behaved as though the cancer could beat him. Guidara, terrified of losing her husband, reached out to medical professionals and friends and family, finally incorporating a number of different therapies into his traditional regimen of surgery, radiation and chemo. As a hypnotherapist herself, Guidara was open to including several Eastern and Western strategies for cleansing and detoxifying the body. Although initially reserved about the practice of Tong Ren, which involves a complicated use of the mind-body connection and anatomical bioelectric signals, she and Frank quickly embraced these methods of acupuncture and healing. Along with praying and relying on many tenets of the raw food movement, Guidara developed a complementary regime of her own to keep Frank strong enough to fight the cancer. Although Frank’s outcome is foretold in the book’s subtitle, Guidara’s moving portrayal of the agony of coping with such a deadly cancer is riveting. She writes in chatty, rapid-fire prose of an almost daily battle to stay strong. Her desperation to find and try anything that might help him, along with her willingness to lay bare her fears and hurts—even sharing that she stockpiled sleeping pills just in case Frank didn’t make it—gives a raw account of the emotional roller coaster that started with a cancer diagnosis.
A stirring, inspiring account of one couple’s story of surviving cancer.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2012
ISBN: 978-1478273592
Page Count: 330
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.
An insider’s chronicle of a pivotal presidential campaign.
Several months into the mounting political upheaval of Donald Trump’s second term and following a wave of bestselling political exposés, most notably Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin on Joe Biden’s health and late decision to step down, former Vice President Harris offers her own account of the consequential months surrounding Biden’s withdrawal and her swift campaign for the presidency. Structured as brief chapters with countdown headers from 107 days to Election Day, the book recounts the campaign’s daily rigors: vetting a running mate, navigating back-to-back rallies, preparing for the convention and the debate with Trump, and deflecting obstacles in the form of both Trump’s camp and Biden’s faltering team. Harris aims to set the record straight on issues that have remained hotly debated. While acknowledging Biden’s advancing decline, she also highlights his foreign-policy steadiness: “His years of experience in foreign policy clearly showed….He was always focused, always commander in chief in that room.” More blame is placed on his inner circle, especially Jill Biden, whom Harris faults for pushing him beyond his limits—“the people who knew him best, should have realized that any campaign was a bridge too far.” Throughout, she highlights her own qualifications and dismisses suggestions that an open contest might have better served the party: “If they thought I was down with a mini primary or some other half-baked procedure, I was quick to disabuse them.” Facing Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior, Harris never openly doubts her ability to confront him. Yet she doesn’t fully persuade the reader that she had the capacity to counter his dominance, suggesting instead that her defeat stemmed from a lack of time—a theme underscored by the urgency of the book’s title. If not entirely sanguine about the future, she maintains a clear-eyed view of the damage already done: “Perhaps so much damage that we will have to re-create our government…something leaner, swifter, and much more efficient.”
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781668211656
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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