Without a hint of bathos or self-pity, and a pleasure to read for its author’s intelligence, wit, humanity, and conviction.
A remarkable first-person account of surviving cancer on one’s own terms.
Gearin-Tosh (English/Oxford Univ.) received the news that he had incurable multiple myeloma in March 1994 and for the next year kept a journal of his efforts to research his deadly disease, assess his options, and find a benign treatment regimen. This journal, supplemented by numerous letters to and from doctors, colleagues, and friends, form the basis for the first part of Living Proof. He relates how, after consulting a number of doctors in both England and the US, he opts not to undergo the brutal chemotherapy recommended by orthodox medicine. (“If your friend touches chemotherapy, he’s a goner” was the warning passed along by someone who had consulted Dr. Ernst Wynder on his behalf.) His research leads him to examine alternative medicine therapies, and he adopts a program utilizing Chinese breathing exercises, acupuncture, regular coffee enemas, and a stringent diet that relies heavily on raw fruits and vegetables supplemented with vitamins and minerals. Gearin-Tosh’s fiercely intelligent account ends in 1995, but the second section, which he wrote six years later, sets this apart from the usual cancer-survival narrative. Prefaced by tributes from two physicians, it includes the author’s analysis of the situation cancer patients are likely to find themselves in and his advice to them. He argues persuasively against being rushed into treatment by doctors’ survival statistics, advocates active involvement in one’s own therapy, and urges resistance to the notion that personal temperament or instincts have no place or value in cancer treatment. Also included is a lengthy medical case history, wryly titled “The Case of the .005% Survivor,” written by his doctor and directed to physicians, giving extensive details about his treatment. An afterword directs readers to a Web site where Gearin-Tosh’s medical records will be kept up-to-date.
Without a hint of bathos or self-pity, and a pleasure to read for its author’s intelligence, wit, humanity, and conviction.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-2517-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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