Sabbage proves to be an empathetic advocate for patients confronting one of the world's most unsparing and mystifying...
A woman courageously stares down incurable late-stage cancer.
Motivational speaker and first-time author Sabbage tells how her "fierce, feisty and indomitable sense of self" drove her to reject defeatist doctors and an impersonal health care system that recommended she accept a traditional, medical death sentence rather than a management plan to treat her disease. In this uplifting book, the author seeks to inspire patients in their journey of "coming to terms" with their mortality. “This is the passage from no to yes,” she writes, “darkness to light, victim to author, paralysis to creativity, passivity to power." Conversely, "if you believe your game is up, then it is." Sabbage provides a directory and self-help guide for cancer patients but little else for loved ones or those not directly affected by the disease. For them, the author offers a two-page list of what well-meaning friends and relatives should do: “Helpful” includes empathy, child care assistance, “prayers (of the authentic variety),” and “not visiting me if you have any viruses, especially if I am going through chemo. Using antibacterial gel before seeing me, even if you are healthy.” On the other hand, “unhelpful” includes “giving me advice” and telling “me about your non-life threatening ailments and how awful they are.” Sabbage is a compassionate writer who advises patients to direct their own treatments, and she provides reassurance that "we cannot control what happens to us, but we can control how we perceive what happens and how we choose to respond." Throughout, she remains both defiant yet encouraging regarding her treatment. "I hope this book will help you experience…the wonder of forging your own path through a dense, dark forest that sometimes seems to offer no respite or escape,” she writes.
Sabbage proves to be an empathetic advocate for patients confronting one of the world's most unsparing and mystifying diseases.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1236-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2017
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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