An informative and moving recollection, despite some overly precious prose.
A woman recounts a decision to pre-empt cancer by surgical means.
In 2008, debut author Shainman’s older sister, Jan (whom she affectionately calls “Sista”), was diagnosed with ovarian and uterine cancer. After several rounds of chemotherapy, Sista’s cancers went into remission, but at a later conference on ovarian cancer, she learned she was especially vulnerable to a recurrence. She underwent genetic testing that revealed that she was “BRCA1 positive,” meaning she had a genetic mutation that significantly increased the chances of contracting breast or ovarian cancer. Shainman quickly decided to get tested, as well, and discovered that she also carried the mutation. This presented her with an achingly difficult choice: Should she strategically choose to undergo prophylactic surgical procedures (bilateral mastectomy, breast reconstruction, bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy, and hysterectomy), or take her chances, and avoid elective, risky operations? The author’s remembrance is unconventionally eclectic; she includes correspondence with friends and family, journal entries and text exchanges, and a lengthy discussion of her view that she’s gifted with a type of emotional “telepathy.” She chronicles not only her own struggle and her sister’s plight, but also her husband’s work colleague’s cancer fight. Also, as her family’s historian, she determines that her paternal grandmother, Lillian, certainly died from breast cancer. Shainman’s memoir is poignantly inspirational throughout; she later writes that she eventually became an advocate for BRCA awareness, and even executive-produced a movie about it in 2015 called Pink & Blue. In addition, she provides sensible information about medical due-diligence, especially involving genetic testing. However, her prose can be cutesy at times, as when she sizes up her anchorman husband’s co-worker: “So, this dazzling woman is whom my husband has been hanging out with on the news set in the middle of the night and early morning? Argh!”
An informative and moving recollection, despite some overly precious prose.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4808-6708-6
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2019
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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