No mere litany of loss, this bittersweet story recounts the survival of the human spirit and family love.
A debut memoir traces how breast cancer affected two generations of one tightknit family, leading to the author undergoing preventive surgery.
Adler is a Davis, California, wellness coach. Her mother and her “twin separated by 16 years,” older sister Lisa, were both diagnosed with breast cancer during a six-month period, forcing Adler to face her own genetic predisposition. The author was enrolled at the University of California at Santa Cruz when her mother had a lumpectomy. Soon Lisa, a 36-year-old mother of two, was diagnosed too; eight years later, she underwent a second mastectomy. Genetic testing had improved by then; it confirmed that Lisa registered positive for the BRCA2 gene mutation. Adler, considered high-risk, started having mammograms at age 26. Meanwhile, their mother was now ill with lung cancer. The author had recently moved back to California from New Jersey with her husband after getting a master’s in public health, and she hosted her mother for her last Thanksgiving before she died in hospice care. This mildly disastrous holiday—complete with a broken garbage disposal and Tofurkey—is a highlight. The siblings lost their father to a heart attack in August 2007. Then, with cancer metastasized to her spine and brain, Lisa died at a hospice center at the end of 2008. Adler’s final promise to Lisa was to go through with the double mastectomy she’d been planning because she learned she also carried BRCA2. “I was choosing this…rather than living in a place of constant concern,” Adler writes. She forthrightly shares her experience of arranging her sister’s funeral, then undergoing a complicated surgery that included MRSA infection and DIEP flap (a type of breast reconstruction) failure. Now she calls herself a cancer “previvor.” This lively memoir is cleverly shaped around breast-related memories, starting with childhood longing—“As a little girl, I dreamed of having boobies”—and moving on to their role in romance and breast-feeding. The chapters are named after slang terms like “Jugs” and “Knockers.” Such touches of humor and whimsy, and Adler’s overall optimism, keep the book from becoming too sad.
No mere litany of loss, this bittersweet story recounts the survival of the human spirit and family love.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5043-5882-8
Page Count: 242
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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