A harrowing, intimately candid survivor’s journey through the minefields of cancer treatment.
A vibrant mental health expert’s bout with brain cancer and the revolutionary treatments that saved her life.
In 2015, Lipska, a veteran neuroscientist and triathlete who studies brains at the National Institute of Mental Health, found herself in a panic while out jogging in her suburban Virginia neighborhood. Without warning, she suddenly didn’t recognize her surroundings and became severely disoriented. Her confusion dissipated, and then she received a devastating diagnosis of metastatic melanoma in her brain. The resulting grueling two-month ordeal battling debilitating mental problems forms the core of this intensive memoir. The author briefly sketches the details of her history as a young, ambitious research scientist in Poland who eventually moved her family to America to pursue the study of brain illnesses and schizophrenia. In 2009, she underwent a mastectomy after a breast cancer diagnosis. In frank, unfettered prose, Lipska clearly demonstrates her courage, resilience, and pure dread in the face of disease and adversity. Of the three tumors found in her brain, one particularly “nasty raisin,” vexingly located in the folds of her visual cortex,” was bleeding. Though excised immediately, the author’s mental acuity deteriorated. Through urgent and vigorous passages, the author chronicles a valiant fight for her life, with radiation treatments and an immunotherapy trial, which caused a whole new subset of medical maladies. Toward the end of the treatment plan, her behavior went haywire, and she suffered cognitive impairment, rage, paranoia, and bafflement, all of which crowded out any semblance of rationality. Eventually, however, the treatments worked, and Lipska experienced a miraculous (and statistically rare) “second chance at sanity.” Throughout it all, the sheer irony of her ordeal never escaped her: “I am living through some of the processes of a disease that I’ve spent my life studying and trying to cure.”
A harrowing, intimately candid survivor’s journey through the minefields of cancer treatment.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-78730-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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
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