Impassioned testimony of a fight for health.
A memoir that explores the idea that women with chronic illnesses need to rally for appropriate medical care.
Making her book debut, Ramey, a writer and musician (known as Wolf Larsen), recounts, with captivating zest, a sorry tale of suffering from a cluster of symptoms that defied diagnosis. “I thought I was the strangest medical case on the East Coast,” she writes, only to discover many others like herself. She was “a woman with a mysterious illness,” a WOMI, chronically exhausted, aching, “likely in possession of at least one autoimmune disease,” and likely to go from physician to physician in search of understanding. The daughter of physicians, Ramey began her quest for help believing unquestioningly in “Magical Pillthink,” the notion “that if something is wrong, there is always a quick fix.” She visited countless specialists and was treated with a host of medications that sometimes temporarily relieved symptoms, but more often not. She experienced “extremely bad—and often explicitly abusive—medical care,” including botched surgeries. The author began to research her condition on her own, making some startling discoveries: the rise of autoimmune diseases in the last 30 years; the significance of the intestinal microbiome to digestive health and fatigue, aching, and “brain fog”; the role of antigens in producing an overactive immune response; physical and emotional traumas that can trigger WOMI symptoms; and microglia, tiny immune cells that protect the brain and nervous system that can become inflamed in response to a variety of stressors. Repeatedly prescribed antidepressants from frustrated doctors, Ramey indicts the medical establishment for its “contempt for women, and for the feminine,” and recommends the new approach of functional medicine, which holds that “diet, lifestyle, and attitude are the cornerstones of health” and incorporates “testing, treating, and stabilizing” the four systems involved in “modern chronic illnesses:” the gut, liver, immune system, and endocrine system. Finally, her condition improved through common-sense changes: “Sleep, movement, a nontoxic environment, and a well-nourished psyche,” Ramey concludes, are the basic needs for recovery.
Impassioned testimony of a fight for health.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-53407-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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
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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