by Michele Lent Hirsch ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 13, 2018
At a moment when women’s experiences in the workplace have come to the fore, Hirsch’s eye-opening study of gender-based...
Part memoir and part sociomedical inquiry, veteran journalist Hirsch’s first book explores the many physical and emotional challenges faced by young women confronted with serious illnesses.
Inspired by her own experiences, the author focuses largely on younger women beset by significant maladies. Struck in her 20s by a daunting combination of hip surgery, thyroid cancer, Lyme disease, mast-cell activation syndrome—a rare autoimmune condition that can throw one inexplicably into anaphylactic shock—plus having witnessed her father, who suffered from multiple sclerosis, take his own life, Hirsch wonders if she is should view herself as a person having a disability, or rather "just all these weird, hard health things woven together.” In this well-researched account, which includes interviews with a number of women struggling with but refusing to be diminished by cancer, HIV, MS, and other diseases, the author notes the additional pressure to appear “youthful and carefree” amid a health crisis. Such cultural expectations lead many young women fighting disease to feel “constantly masked,” especially when fearing rejection by peers and sexual partners and subjected to callous employers—e.g., one of Hirsch’s former editors told her, “I don’t want to hear about your cancer.” In addition to disturbing anecdotal evidence showing the medical profession’s historic discounting of women’s pain, the author cites a variety of statistics showing gross gender inequity in clinical trials, which study primarily male subjects. Hirsch points out that federal Food and Drug Administration guidelines from 1977 prevented childbearing-age women from even participating in drug trials—a ban that wasn’t lifted “until 1993.” Even though about half of those living with HIV are women, a 2016 report revealed they represented only 19 percent of those studied in clinical trials of HIV antiretroviral drugs, and women were also found to be “underrepresented” in “high-impact studies of non-sex-specific cancers.”
At a moment when women’s experiences in the workplace have come to the fore, Hirsch’s eye-opening study of gender-based disparity surrounding illness will hopefully help spawn a similar reckoning for women’s health.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8070-2395-2
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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BOOK REVIEW
edited by Elizabeth Mandel , Emanuelle Sippy , Maya Savin Miller , Michele Lent Hirsch & jGirls Magazine Collective
by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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by Jon Krakauer
BOOK REVIEW
by Jon Krakauer
BOOK REVIEW
by Jon Krakauer
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SEEN & HEARD
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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Pulitzer Prize Finalist
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
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