A satisfying, informative memoir of the perseverance and bravery necessary to survive a painful illness.
A harrowing journey into and out of colonic disease.
California-based electrical engineer and marketing specialist Sardana’s grueling, 20-year odyssey battling chronic inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) began when the author first had intestinal discomfort and rectal bleeding during the summer of 1990. A series of exploratory examinations revealed ulcerative colitis as the culprit, which is a principal component of IBD, an involuntary, autoimmune response to pathogens present in the gut. Medications helped, but the inflammation became a chronic condition, as did his yo-yoing weight and mood swings. Raised in India, Sardana describes many Indian traditions throughout the book, including food and social customs and marital rites, though his battle with IBD remains the centerpiece as he describes his relentless worsening condition, leading to the successful excision of his colon and rectum. After the birth of his two children, however, Crohn’s disease emerged, and its ensuing complications ushered in a new host of associative troubles such as depression, insomnia, and diabetes, all of which the author controlled with more than 30 daily medications. He comprehensively describes surgeries with intricate narration, figure drawings, and postoperative photographic imagery, which may prove too graphic for sensitive readers. Also included is the preoperative and postoperative play-by-play from his experiences with the incapacitating illness alongside an exploration of alternative healing therapies, such as meditation, yoga, and acupuncture, which boosted his severely deteriorated quality of life as the ordeal progressed yet eventually became manageable. Reflecting on his own hopeful prognosis, his text offers compassionate understanding, personal coping mechanisms, and well-coordinated comfort to other “comrades” with a core message of hope, survival, and coexistence with the intimidating condition. Sardana remains a surprisingly grounded narrator throughout his two-decade ordeal, reflecting that “there is nothing like a full-blown medical crisis to make you fully alive to the precariousness of your existence.” A reliable spokesman and treatment advocate for the disease, his current proactive awareness campaign includes a website and personal appearances.
A satisfying, informative memoir of the perseverance and bravery necessary to survive a painful illness.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1497457003
Page Count: 176
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2015
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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