A lawyer recounts her attempts to promote a natural cure for cancer in this debut medical memoir.
Beljanski’s parents, Mirko and Monique, were French cancer researchers who discovered two plant extracts with the power to eliminate cancerous stem cells while causing no harm to healthy cells. (If the stem cells are not killed, “the tumor will soon grow back.”) Although these findings were not widely known, the author’s parents had a highly successful treatment rate. Their most famous patient was none other than the long-serving French President François Mitterrand. But, according to Beljanski, the use of the extracts on Mitterrand exposed her parents to the ire of the French medical and political establishment: “Anything natural that works better than synthetic drugs is perceived as a frontal attack on the entire economy of pharmaceutical companies….The products, the man who conceived them, and all the know-how surrounding them must be destroyed.” Soldiers were dispatched to Mirko’s lab to arrest the couple and seize whatever research they could find. Across the sea in New York, Beljanski, an attorney who had never taken an active role in her parents’ work, became immediately drawn into the case, not simply to free them but to ensure that the people who had become reliant on the treatment they had engineered could continue to receive it. Following her father’s death in 1998, she created the Beljanski Foundation to promote and advance his research. The author has been trying to bring attention to the potentially cancer-obliterating powers of plant extracts ever since, though she has found that the medical establishment is no less powerful or self-interested today than it was when it sent those soldiers to Mirko’s lab. Beljanski writes in an energetic prose that lends much tension and drama to her narrative: “I hurried to open the door when I heard a knock, and if I was unnerved by the words spoken to me by Gérard the day before at the cemetery, it was nothing compared to what I felt when I opened the door.” Indeed, the great success of the book is as a nonfiction thriller, with the Beljanski research as a Holy Grail at the center. In this way, the volume is an entertaining read, particularly given the high stakes of the research and the ongoing destruction wrought by cancer. The idea that the cure might be found in something as simple as plant extracts is highly attractive, and those already interested in natural medicine should be sympathetic to the author’s cause. But it’s difficult to take Beljanski completely seriously given the conspiratorial bent of her narrative. (She all but alleges that the French government was attempting to draw out the investigation into her father for the purpose of exhausting and killing him: “When the defendant dies, the prosecutor no longer has to prove his case.”) There is also the indisputably promotional nature of the book to consider (the author is a conference speaker). It’s a compelling yarn nonetheless, and it does grant a window into the intriguing, competitive, and moneyed world of cancer research.
A dramatic account of a controversial natural cancer treatment.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68350-724-6
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HEALTH & FITNESS | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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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
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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