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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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