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THE RED DEVIL

Name: THE RED DEVIL
Author: Katherine Russell Rich
ISBN: 0-609-60321-3

TO HELL WITH CANCER...AND BACK

by Katherine Russell Rich ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 22, 1999

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Sharp and funny memoirs of a bright, tough woman fighting cancer and winning. In August 1988, Rich, then a 32-year-old magazine editor, discovered a lump in her breast. She didn—t know it then, but as she puts it now, she was “entering Cancerland.” Her journey is a rough one and, at least here, has no end. She has a lumpectomy, followed by chemotherapy and radiation. But by the time she’s 37, the cancer has metastasized to her spine, and there’s a terrifying episode in which she is temporarily paralyzed. Radiation treatment is followed by hormone therapy, but two years later, the cancer is back again and preparations begin for a bone marrow transplant. Three years after that, the cancer recurs in her adrenals, and hormone treatments begin again. Those are the bare facts, but Rich’s account is much more than a medical log. While in Cancerland, she falls in and out of love, joins and leaves support groups, changes jobs and doctors, meets “cancer queens,” who demand sympathy, and “kick-ass cancer patients,” who fight back. She tells what it’s like to be isolated from one’s co-workers and also what it’s like to have a totally supportive boss. Loneliness, friendship, and man-woman relationships are explored, as is getting used to an altered body. There are the usual medical mishaps and doctor horror stories, but Rich is no whiner. She is a wry and perceptive observer of human behavior and a crisp and spirited narrator of her own experience as a cancer survivor. The title’s “red devil,” incidentally, is Adriamycin, an intravenous drug she encounters in her first chemotherapy session and likens to Drano, for it’s so corrosive that if spilled on the skin it can cause third-degree burns. Read it and weep, and laugh aloud too.

Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1999

ISBN: 0-609-60321-3

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL NONFICTION

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.