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
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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