Highly recommended: an exceptionally well-organized, authoritative, and readable resource book.
A valuable resource for those wondering whether there is a chance that cancer runs in their family.
Ross (Director, Cancer Genetics Program/Univ. of Texas Southwestern Medical Center) has the ideal background: oncologist, cancer survivor who carries a cancer gene mutation, and cancer gene researcher with a mission to help people. She sends an upbeat message that learning about a cancer mutation in one’s family history is not about coping with bad news; it is about taking control and making choices. Although readers learn about the author’s decision-making process when she discovered the risks of her mutant gene, she does not claim that they were the best choices at the time nor does she prescribe what choices others should make. She organizes her information with great care and clarity, and thankfully, she lightens the reading with her personal story and those of the cancer patients she has known. Ross explains how cancer mutations are passed through families, how to recognize the signs of a cancer mutation, how to create a revealing family tree, how to get genetic counseling and genetic testing, and how to tell family members that they may be at risk, often information they may not want to hear. Furthermore, she describes how to manage one’s risk when experts give conflicting information or when information is limited. The chapter on targeted treatments, subtitled “Realities, Myths, Possibilities,” is sometimes a bit technical, but Ross calmly advises readers to evaluate current research on new treatments in the same way they researched their family history: with persistence, honesty, and toleration for the discomfort of not knowing. Appendices provide additional practical information on inherited cancer syndromes and their risk management, and a resource list contains the names and websites of helpful support organizations.
Highly recommended: an exceptionally well-organized, authoritative, and readable resource book.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-98283-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Avery
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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