A personal, conversational, and positive perspective on handling the ups and downs of cancer treatment and survival.
In this debut guide to thriving through a cancer diagnosis and the healing process, the author gives intimate, friendly, and firm advice about handling family, medical providers, fear, and decision-making.
Cancer can shock and rattle even the strongest of families, and McDonough is no stranger to the changes that take place immediately after the diagnosis is delivered. In her guide, the author reaches out to readers grappling with their own struggles and offers focus points in the form of myths and truths. Her advice is holistic, presenting strategies of faith and perspective to reconcile what really happens emotionally to the person coping with the diagnosis and what is expected, externally, from friends, family, and medical providers. For example, in one section, McDonough describes firing an oncologist to choose a different doctor she felt was a better fit. The “myth,” she asserts, that a cancer sufferer should be a “good patient” who cooperates and pleases all of the nurses and doctors is simply not the first priority of the individual undergoing treatment, regardless of what society seems to expect. As she puts it, “Perfect patient? No way, nor did I aspire to be that. Perfect doctors? Just as unrealistic and, I might add, unfair.” While McDonough stresses that no one is perfect in this process, she describes one doctor who came in on a weekend day off to sit with her and explain her diagnosis more fully to ease anxieties. Another point of emphasis is patient autonomy. The author cites the importance of patients involving and informing family members yet making clear their intentions to control decisions about their own health. This, she explains, is one of the most important things for the patient to preserve. One aspect that likely sets this book apart from other similar guides in the genre is McDonough’s experience of catching cancer early. This title may carry the advantage of reaching those readers who were fortunate enough to receive an early diagnosis but still endured the fears and unknowns of procedures like lumpectomies and radiation. But the author presents all cancer patients with an important message: you are a warrior and survivor, regardless of how early you were diagnosed or the duration and complexity of your treatment.
A personal, conversational, and positive perspective on handling the ups and downs of cancer treatment and survival.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9966977-0-5
Page Count: 102
Publisher: Sapphire River Publishing Services
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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