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WHAT IF TOMORROW NEVER COMES?

A touching memoir of dealing with two losses.

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A memoir of a father, his family and their collective battle with his daughter’s cancer.

Schwartz is a father, husband and attorney experiencing spiritual galut, a Hebrew word meaning the search to gain understanding of one’s existence. His faith was tested when his 26-year-old daughter was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. A former production assistant on the CBS TV show How I Met Your Mother, Amy had found her dream career as a preschool teacher. Schwartz and his wife, Joanne, accompanied Amy to every appointment and test. As Amy’s health deteriorated, so did her mother’s. While being a caregiver for her daughter in her time of need, Joanne died one night of a heart attack. Schwartz was devastated, as was Amy, but they tried not to lose hope and instead continued with Amy’s treatments and medications. Eventually, Amy chose home hospice care, and the nurses told Schwartz her body was transitioning toward death. Even with Amy’s passing, Schwartz astoundingly kept his faith and followed the Jewish tradition of shiva, a weeklong mourning period after the dead are buried. The beginning chapters of Schwartz’s memoir recount the family’s history and their journey through galut, with an essaylike level of detail that’s compelling although separate in some ways from the heart of the story. The book then moves to his daughter’s battle with cancer, a story both heartbreaking and powerful. Though Schwartz’s poetry interspersed throughout the book doesn’t add much, a poignant excerpt from Amy’s diary about her time as an intern on MTV’s New Tom Green Show as the “gum girl”—she collected the audience’s gum in a jar, since chewing it was not allowed—showcases the optimistic person Amy was. An absorbing read, the heartrending memoir portrays the family’s tragic but compelling story without sentimentality but with Schwartz’s ample love for his family and a wish to help others.

A touching memoir of dealing with two losses.

Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013

ISBN: 978-1484900352

Page Count: 224

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2013

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THE SURVIVORS CLUB

THE SECRET AND SCIENCE THAT COULD SAVE YOUR LIFE

The protagonists may have stayed calm, but these stories of cheating the reaper are crazy wild.

Sherwood (The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud, 2004, etc.) investigates why some live, others don’t.

His subjects are the people who closely encountered the proverbial cement truck when they stepped out the door one sunny morning, yet lived to tell about it: the woman who dropped six miles through the sky without a parachute; the man who ejected from his fighter plane at sea level doing Mach 1; the woman who fell on her knitting needle, which proceeded through her sternum directly into her heart. Their stories are gripping, to put it mildly, and Sherwood is enough of a storyteller to maintain the narrative pace throughout. He's also enough of a sideshow barker to write that this book “unlocks the secrets of who lives and who dies,” though not with so straight a face as to sound like he’s peddling snake oil. He probes each fantastic story for that mysterious something that pulled the person through. What role did nature play, and what role nurture? Luck is good, Sherwood discovers—luck being a product of openness to random opportunities around you—but keeping your head is critical. The composed often live, the stunned less so, the hysterical rarely. Being relaxed is also a plus, and religious belief, or surrendering to a higher power, has worked its charms. Statistical oddities are curious but unilluminating: Are lefties doomed to shorter lives? Do your initials condemn you? Sometimes the material beggars belief. Can someone who has sunk 20 feet into the ocean and “let seawater fill his lungs” really make it back? Still, Sherwood gains our trust with his Boy Scout common sense: Be prepared, play to your strengths, stay unruffled, keep the faith.

The protagonists may have stayed calm, but these stories of cheating the reaper are crazy wild.

Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-446-58024-3

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008

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THE THIRD CHAPTER

PASSION, RISK, AND ADVENTURE IN THE TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER 50

Heady, fruitful explorations of ill-charted terrain destined for a population explosion.

Insightful vignettes of people navigating the squirrelly years between 50 and 75.

Lawrence-Lightfoot (Education/Harvard Univ.; The Essential Conversation, 2003, etc.) profiles 40 individuals who had, by one measure or another, successful working lives and then took a new tack after age 50—voluntarily or not. They may be educated and financially secure, but they are also fragile and assailable in ways they haven’t experienced for many years as they make their way over foreign ground. They frequently find it discomfiting to be scrutinizing their identities and seeking to align their values with their actions, notes the author: “Something in us feels we are being irresponsible, or inappropriate, or maybe even unseemly, when we admit our lust for new learning,” especially when society assumes it’s time for them to be put out to pasture. Lawrence-Lightfoot’s investigation is anything but a dry, academic study. Her voice is by turns thoughtful, soothing and plaintive, as well as hungry for understanding what does and doesn’t work for these pilgrims. Standardized educational formats aren’t much help, she discovers; “school values and practices may distort organic learning across the life span, compromising and masking the impulses that might make us productive and creative learners.” It’s eye-opening to witness all the heavy lifting involved in these skirmishes with the new, including a lot of inefficiency and circling. (Happily, readers also learn that “old burdens become lighter.”) Tension, strangely enough, may prove crucial—not the kind of tension that leads to stress, but the kind that demands reconciliation between opposing forces or the charting of new scenarios by confronting ancient traumas. Other qualities worth having in your quiver: “openness, fearlessness, humility, and [the] capacity to look foolish.” It helps to be surrounded by a caring society—which is either the good news or the bad news, depending on your reservoir of another helpful virtue: hope.

Heady, fruitful explorations of ill-charted terrain destined for a population explosion.

Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-374-27549-5

Page Count: 262

Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008

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