A smart, perceptive, and wryly humorous memoir about making the best out of a precarious situation.
An intimate account of a diagnosis of prostate cancer and its subsequent treatment.
Mac (Hallow Mass, 2016), a novelist and multi-Emmy–winning writer and producer for such animated programs as Animaniacs and Freakazoid, re-creates the harrowing experience of his brush with prostate cancer in 2014 at age 61. It all started with a follow-up visit to the doctor after an alarmingly irregular blood test. When a biopsy came back positive for malignancy, Mac spent “a few days awash in maudlin self-pity” before he and his wife, Joy, assessed the situation by doing some recommended reading (of Dr. Patrick Walsh’s Guide to Surviving Prostate Cancer) and reviewing remission statistics. In this slim memoir, Mac imparts information from his research on the prostate gland, cancer treatment options, and how things such as prostate-specific antigen levels and Gleason test scores can determine severity, progression, and prognosis. He goes on to describe his entire treatment journey in exacting detail and with wit and candor that eschew the grimness of many other cancer memoirs. Having endured three previous major operations for other maladies, the author was no stranger to the world of physician referrals and treatment regimens. He also discusses his pricey COBRA insurance coverage after his job prospects dried up. After he agrees to a robotic radical prostatectomy procedure, the narrative flows through a mélange of preoperative and postoperative sensory observations that include all the gory details, including unexpected and troublesome complications. Mac’s ordeal is refreshingly leavened, though, by his unique brand of dark, sarcastic humor, as when he laments an unromantic byproduct of surgical recovery (“Wearing a big wet man diaper chilled my passion”). This often charming remembrance will leave readers with a new appreciation for good health and a more optimistic outlook when things go awry.
A smart, perceptive, and wryly humorous memoir about making the best out of a precarious situation.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Cornerstone Media
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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