Inspiring, instructive memoir for cancer patients and their loved ones.
In this debut memoir developed from her blog, a California attorney shares her transformative journey following a midlife cancer diagnosis.
In 2011, Mock’s life was humming. A successful San Francisco lawyer, she was enjoying her “midlife crisis convertible,” her 50th birthday gift to herself, and studying Italian to further enjoy her trips abroad. Then she got a curveball: a little lump on her neck led to a diagnosis of stage 4 ovarian cancer. The news was a game-changer: some friends disappeared, and her relationship with girlfriend Andrea eventually fell apart. Mock started a blog (from which this book is developed) to share her emotions and experiences, particularly her determination to battle and live beyond her illness. While undergoing a hysterectomy and many rounds of chemo, Mock avoided Internet research, encased her head in deep-freeze “Penguin Caps” to prevent hair loss, and regularly exercised. She emerged from her treatment with clear medical scans and a fresh perspective, with work/life balance a new priority. She participated in LiveStrong biking events (despite mixed emotions about Lance Armstrong) and, best of all, met beautiful, supportive Carole, who soon became her wife. Today, Mock continues to have worries—including a 2013 spike in abnormal scans—but she decided “to pursue joy, not gloom,” fully aware that “staying true to the wisdom gained from having cancer is an ongoing process.” Mock wrote this lively, motivating memoir from the cancer trenches, providing many black-and-white photos of herself that reflect her philosophy of bringing positive energy to a cancer diagnosis. She offers numerous examples of such behavior not only in her own actions, but from those around her, including from her Italian teacher; the book’s title comes from an English translation of the latter’s remark, “Non tutto il male viene per nuocere.” While some readers may question Mock’s emphasis on exercise to battle disease, she discusses this idea within the context of describing her entire course of care.
Inspiring, instructive memoir for cancer patients and their loved ones.Pub Date: July 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-49-176708-5
Page Count: 186
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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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