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
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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