An optimistic account that effectively advocates treating disease as something to work through— not fight.
An entrepreneur and speaker chronicles her breast cancer journey in this debut memoir and self-help book.
Davis was only 38 years old when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The news was not a complete surprise; she had noticed a lump but delayed seeing a doctor due to her growing business, BlueAvocado. She and her family had endured too many recent brushes with cancer. She had lost two aunts over several years, and her college friend Courtney had just been told she had breast cancer. After her diagnosis, Davis vowed never to use the terms “fight” or “battle” to describe her cancer odyssey. Already experienced with alternative medicine and spiritual practices, she quickly assembled a team—half-jokingly calling it “Team Woo-Woo”—and apprised it of her treatment plan. With her parents and sisters by her side, she had surgery at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Learning that the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes, she underwent six months of chemotherapy. Surrounded by an amazing support group of family, friends, and colleagues, Davis managed to remain upbeat, admitting that not having to worry about medical or living expenses was a privilege not everyone gets to enjoy. While she underwent traditional medical treatment for her cancer, she supplemented her healing with therapy from Flint Sparks, a psychotherapist and Zen Buddhist priest. Despite the name she gave her team, Davis formulated a treatment plan that was not outlandish. Primarily a memoir, this book—which features a few photographs—is very readable, surprisingly enjoyable, and truly uplifting. The author does not recommend any outrageous diets or cleansing rituals. Davis merely suggests that patients achieve a greater self-awareness and remain in tune with their bodies instead of acting like a war is being waged. She is refreshingly upfront about all aspects of her operation, treatment, and recovery, explaining the reconstructive surgery and decisions for her nipple tattoos. The most painful part of the work focuses on her decision not to delay her surgery to harvest eggs, forcing her to accept that she will never give birth to children. As Davis reveals in her engrossing book, she embarked on her cancer journey with a key advantage: She was already meditating and embracing holistic living.
An optimistic account that effectively advocates treating disease as something to work through— not fight.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-381-6
Page Count: 141
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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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