On a level with Lewis Thomas for its clarity and verve in presenting the science of the cell and the ability of cancer to...
Former Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center president and CEO Marks delivers a panoramic view of developments in cancer research and treatment over the last 40 years, from both the researchers’ and administrators’ perspectives.
In this boldly presented argument, written with the assistance of Wall Street Journal senior business writer Sterngold (Burning Down the House: How Greed, Deceit, and Bitter Revenge Destroyed E.F. Hutton, 1990), Marks passionately explains how best to pursue a course of action to control cancer’s tenacity. Cancer is protean, individualistic, complex, elusive and efficient. “The truth,” writes the author, “uncomfortable and inconvenient as it may be, is that medical science has never faced a more inscrutable, more mutable, or more ruthless adversary.” Thus, understanding its biology, as well as its ability to shape-shift between patients, is vital, and we must also remember that as long as cell division is how we propagate and survive, cancers will develop, for that, too, is how they work. It’s not surprising that Marks calls cancer “the existential illness.” This excellent elementary grounding in cancer’s workings allows readers to appreciate the importance of, say, the differences between empirical and mechanistic methods of developing treatments; why seemingly random advances in molecular biology and genetics are potentially valuable (“basic research has been the engine for most of the successes in the war on cancer”); why flexibility in research is critical to its creativity and innovation; and why a close coordination between the lab and the clinic, the diagnostic and therapeutic programs, researchers and doctors, is so essential. Marks also interweaves his own story into the changes in cancer medicine: his particular research interests against the background of the politics of medicine and how to “not throw too much money at the false promise of quick cures.” Most importantly, we must translate scientific insights into therapies.
On a level with Lewis Thomas for its clarity and verve in presenting the science of the cell and the ability of cancer to assume multiple guises.Pub Date: March 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-252-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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