Sharp and funny memoirs of a bright, tough woman fighting cancer and winning. In August 1988, Rich, then a 32-year-old magazine editor, discovered a lump in her breast. She didn—t know it then, but as she puts it now, she was “entering Cancerland.” Her journey is a rough one and, at least here, has no end. She has a lumpectomy, followed by chemotherapy and radiation. But by the time she’s 37, the cancer has metastasized to her spine, and there’s a terrifying episode in which she is temporarily paralyzed. Radiation treatment is followed by hormone therapy, but two years later, the cancer is back again and preparations begin for a bone marrow transplant. Three years after that, the cancer recurs in her adrenals, and hormone treatments begin again. Those are the bare facts, but Rich’s account is much more than a medical log. While in Cancerland, she falls in and out of love, joins and leaves support groups, changes jobs and doctors, meets “cancer queens,” who demand sympathy, and “kick-ass cancer patients,” who fight back. She tells what it’s like to be isolated from one’s co-workers and also what it’s like to have a totally supportive boss. Loneliness, friendship, and man-woman relationships are explored, as is getting used to an altered body. There are the usual medical mishaps and doctor horror stories, but Rich is no whiner. She is a wry and perceptive observer of human behavior and a crisp and spirited narrator of her own experience as a cancer survivor. The title’s “red devil,” incidentally, is Adriamycin, an intravenous drug she encounters in her first chemotherapy session and likens to Drano, for it’s so corrosive that if spilled on the skin it can cause third-degree burns. Read it and weep, and laugh aloud too.
Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1999
ISBN: 0-609-60321-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
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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