A short but comprehensive inspirational handbook that helps cancer patients focus on their emotional well-being.
The latest from McDonough (8 Steps to Getting Real with Cancer, 2016) charts what she calls “a simple path for a complicated journey,” aiming a series of insights and observations squarely at people undergoing cancer treatment.
Newly diagnosed patients face a bombardment of tasks: mountains of information to be digested (much of it involving quite literally life-or-death decisions), appointments, follow-ups, and lots of independent research, etc. As McDonough notes in this pithy, uplifting new work of nonfiction, this can often distract patients from remembering that, as she puts it, hope does not exist without vision. The guiding principle of the book is that a positive, life-affirming vision is every bit as important as all the practical care tactics new patients are given. Cognizant of this, McDonough, herself a cancer survivor, concentrates on offering strategies to give readers sources of strength for the long-term process. “You are in charge of your own journey,” McDonough writes. “It belongs to you and no one else.” In short, incisive segments, she reviews many of the emotional aspects of dealing with cancer, from feelings of shame or weakness (“shame and embarrassment don’t belong in the cancer journey and are of no help whatsoever”) to isolation from friends and family to the passivity that’s often an instinctive reaction to the diagnosis. Throughout, the author contends that developing emotional coping strategies is every bit as important as making informed medical decisions. By succinctly breaking down a series of “myths” commonly associated with cancer (like patients must blindly follow doctors’ orders or continuously maintain composure), McDonough very skillfully manages the difficult trick of categorizing typical patient reactions without criticizing those having the reactions. She recommends being a “proactive” survivor who isn’t embarrassed to advocate for themselves, and each section of her short but powerful guide includes inspirational quotes and open-ended questions designed to help readers examine their own feelings at each stage of their journey (“Feed your fears and your faith will starve,” goes a sample quote from Max Lucado. “Feed your faith, and your fears will”). McDonough is a practicing Christian and often addresses such issues for her fellow believers, but her counsel is broad-based and compassionate enough to appeal to secular patients as well. Cancer treatment, she concedes, is “a necessary evil” that can be better endured by paying serious attention to one’s mental attitude, one of the last things most new cancer patients consider. With concise frankness, McDonough offers encouragement and advice (“today: I will obtain treatment details in advance to minimize surprises and approach treatment with realistic confidence”), infusing practical optimism into every stage of the process, from the shock of the initial diagnosis to the enduring depression that often accompanies surviving. Patients are urged to hold onto their health like a pit bull and to make wise lifestyle, sleep cycle, and nutrition choices. The chapter on dealing with all the real-world stresses (financial, work-related, etc.) of a cancer fight is particularly useful.
A short but comprehensive inspirational handbook that helps cancer patients focus on their emotional well-being.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9966977-3-6
Page Count: 124
Publisher: Sapphire River Publishing Services
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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