A firsthand account of dealing with cancer that would benefit from a tighter focus but remains touching in its positivity.
This debut book chronicles a woman’s 11-year battle with cancer, told through emails to her prayer circle.
In November 2004, Rodrigue and her husband, Kenny, moved to Ocala, Florida, with their three children: Nicole, 18; Marc, 16; and Garrett, 11. After a year of unpacking and looking for a new job, Rodrigue went in for a routine doctor visit only to learn that she had peritoneal cancer. Soon after, she began sending out emails to her “prayer warrior” circle of friends, family, and fellow members of her church. The emails detail her numerous trips to cancer centers in larger cities, where she learned of Tumor Boards, CA-125 levels, and the devastating effects of chemotherapy. She also took the time to fill in these updates with personal observations and small moments of faith and reassurance she found in the halls of the hospitals. Rodrigue learned more about herself while sharing the Psalms and other Bible verses that helped her cope and strengthened her own faith: “God’s Grace is enough. It is everything! I am more sure of His promises because of this cancer.” In 2007, she found herself notifying the prayer warriors that she was “amazed” it had been two and a half years since her surgery, but a second diagnosis led her to confront the “why” questions with God. In 2015, Kenny updated the prayer warriors on her final days in home hospice care, and the book concludes with eulogies written by her children. It is impossible to not be moved by these final pages, and Rodrigue’s unrelenting positivity and total faith shine through many of the preceding emails. But the choice to present her journey exclusively through the emails she and Kenny wrote does hold back the potential emotional impact of her struggle. The emails focus on the details and the day-to-day information important to friends and close relatives at the time. Some editing to truly highlight the moments in which Rodrigue’s attitude and beliefs—the aspects most important to the reader—take center stage would make her story even more powerful.
A firsthand account of dealing with cancer that would benefit from a tighter focus but remains touching in its positivity.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5127-6516-8
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 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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