A practical, comprehensive, and authoritative work.
A treatment-selection guide for the savvy prostate cancer patient.
Editor and author Scholz’s (co-author: Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers, 2010) layman’s guide to prostate cancer aims to help men to understand the severity of their ailment and to create a “personalized treatment plan” in concert with their physicians. The author is the executive director of the Prostate Cancer Research Institute and a physician who’s treated prostate cancer for more than 20 years, and he’s joined by a large cohort of other oncology experts, each of whom contributes chapters that define and discuss the “basic components” of prostate cancer diagnosis (including PSA [prostate specific antigen] levels, a Gleason score, prostate scans, and body scans). The crux of the guide, the “Five Stages of Blue,” classifies newly diagnosed patients as either low-, intermediate-, or high-risk (Sky, Teal, or Azure, respectively) and veteran patients as either having a relapse (Indigo) or metastasis (Royal). Readers can skip ahead to the chapters that are most pertinent to their stage. The book’s overall goal is to allow men to make prudent treatment decisions—and, especially, to help them avoid potentially irrevocable damage to their quality of life due to unnecessary surgery or radiation treatment. Most prostate cancer patients are referred to surgeons (primarily urologists); according to author Ralph Blum, there are fewer than 20 oncologists who specialize exclusively in this type of cancer, so this guide is necessary and useful. The multiple experts successfully provide context in patient-friendly but not overly simplistic terms. The book’s pragmatic and systematic consideration of treatment options and risks will allow readers to make educated decisions. In short, the guide accomplishes what it set out to do: it “forewarn[s] and forearm[s]” patients about “industry biases” and “less-than-fully informed” physicians.
A practical, comprehensive, and authoritative work.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9990652-1-1
Page Count: 492
Publisher: Prostate Oncology Specialists
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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