A brutally honest account of the author’s ovarian cancer treatment and a staunch protest against the state of contemporary approaches to the disease.
In telling her personal story, feminist scholar Gubar (Judas: A Biography, 2009, etc.) remains the academic, looking for understanding not just in the medical literature but also in Frida Kahlo's art, Margaret Edson's drama Wit, Barbara Creaturo's memoir Courage and other women's writings, both formal and informal. When the author learned that most ovarian cancers cannot be cured because the disease is rarely diagnosed before it has reached a deadly stage, she made it her goal to help women recognize its early warning signs. A brief, somewhat dry chapter on ovaries and how they have been regarded throughout history precedes her personal account. For her, the treatment began with debulking—a drastic surgical procedure that she calls disemboweling—followed by rounds of debilitating chemotherapy. The surgery launched a cascade of intestinal disasters, including perforation, abscesses, loss of bowel control and an ileostomy. Gubar's description of these indignities is disturbing and graphic. She blames them not on doctor errors but on "the ruthless instruments, technologies, and formulas of the medical machine.” Doctors, she writes, have no alternatives to the standard treatments now available to ovarian cancer patients. In her case, remission followed, but so did recurrence, and she was faced with the decision of whether to undergo further surgery and chemotherapy that could retard but not halt the spread of cancer or to stop treatment and allow the cancer cells to take over her body. Gubar lets the reader inside her mind as she grapples with this issue. Not just a grueling memoir of facing a deadly disease but a powerful exposé of the failure of medical science to find better ways to detect and treat it.
Pub Date: April 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07325-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2012
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
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
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