An unflinching account of “the good, the bad, and the bald, ugly truth” about cancer.
The former Good Morning America host takes readers backstage in this unvarnished account of her bout with breast cancer.
A longtime advocate for women's health, Lunden (Wake Up Calls: Making the Most Out of Every Day, 2000, etc.) lives her life in the public eye. When she was diagnosed with two cancerous tumors in June 2014, she announced the news on national TV. The author describes the challenge of putting on a brave public face while undergoing rigorous treatment. Her stress peaked in September, when she was asked to appear on the cover of People without a wig to cover her chemotherapy-induced baldness. The decision to go ahead with the photo shoot was difficult, but she ultimately agreed. Her youthful appearance belied her age of 64, and her appearance was an important part of her celebrity status. “I am all about ‘sixty is the new forty,’ ” she writes, sharing her unwillingness to be called Grandma even though she adored the role. After her diagnosis with a rare type of aggressive breast cancer, the specialists she consulted were initially at odds about the best treatment protocol: whether to operate first or start with an initial round of chemotherapy before operating. The stakes were high. If the chemo treatment was successful, then the surgery would be less invasive; if it wasn’t, postponing surgery increased the risk. Lunden opted for chemotherapy, then surgery, followed by more chemotherapy and radiation. A strict diet and exercise regimen were also part of the package. The author describes her elation when the doctors determined that her tumors had shrunk dramatically after the first round of chemo. The side effects from chemotherapy were rough, but with the support of family, friends, and fans, Lunden was able to maintain her active lifestyle. Though not without its overwritten sections, the book is inspiring and informative.
An unflinching account of “the good, the bad, and the bald, ugly truth” about cancer.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-240408-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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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