One moment, Neha Ganju Tanna was a happy new mother to a beautiful baby girl. The next, she was a terminal cancer patient. Neha refused to let her diagnosis define her. This is a compilation of her writings near the end of her life. Through her insight and advice, Neha left an important legacy for the ones she left behind. In this memoir, the author shares how she was able to enjoy her life despite knowing her end. Much of Nehas memoir is directed to her daughter. She describes cherished memories with her new baby girl and offers her insight into all the challenges of growing up. Neha also shares the everyday challenges of being a cancer patient and the need to raise awareness of the insidious disease. Finally, she delves into her own ideas about the nature of God, family, and identity. Each new page reveals a fascinating new facet of an amazing woman -- and a new lens through which we should view our own lives.
Moving between journal entry, memoir, and exposition, Audre Lorde fuses the personal and political as she reflects on her experience coping with breast cancer and a radical mastectomy. A Penguin Classic First published over forty years ago, The Cancer Journals is a startling, powerful account of Audre Lorde's experience with breast cancer and mastectomy. Long before narratives explored the silences around illness and women's pain, Lorde questioned the rules of conformity for women's body images and supported the need to confront physical loss not hidden by prosthesis. Living as a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," Lorde heals and re-envisions herself on her own terms and offers her voice, grief, resistance, and courage to those dealing with their own diagnosis. Poetic and profoundly feminist, Lorde's testament gives visibility and strength to women with cancer to define themselves, and to transform their silence into language and action.
In the prime of life, a wife, mother, and businesswoman, Paula Black, heard the dreaded words: It's cancer. Doctors gave her three to six months to live. With her husband Dale's help, they tirelessly researched every conventional and alternative cancer treatment available. They discovered God-given methods that treat the whole person and the root causes of disease. Paula eventually succeeded without chemotherapy or radiation. Her advanced-stage cancer was gone. She got her life back. Using this book as your complete guide, you can do what she did easily, painlessly, at low cost, and at home. Never fear cancer again "
A memoir by American former actress and singer Jennette McCurdy about her career as a child actress and her difficult relationship with her abusive mother who died in 2013
July 15, 2013 was a defining moment in the life of Dr. Uzma Yunus. On that day, at age 41, she was diagnosed with Stage III breast cancer. The diagnosis derailed an unstoppable life of achievement, first as a determined medical student in Pakistan and later as an award-winning psychiatrist in the United States. Almost immediately after learning of her condition, Dr. Yunus began writing "Left Boob Gone Rogue," a personal blog of her experiences. Her honest, unflinching, often funny look at cancer from the unique perspective of a clinician has earned her a loyal following of over 300,000 readers in 172 countries. She became an unwitting voice in the breast cancer community, with essays appearing in "The New York Times," "Huffington Post," breastcancer.org, and many other publications. In April 2016 she was chosen to be one of the Ford Warriors in Pink Models of Courage for her advocacy and outreach. Her memoir, "Left Boob Gone Rogue" grew out of her online musings. In the book, Dr. Yunus delivers astringent insight on what it is to live with uncertainty, with pain, with the daily possibility of death--but also with happiness, fidelity, and faith--in the clutches of an unpredictable and dreadful disease. "Left Boob Gone Rogue" is not simply a story about illness and dying; it's a story about the experience of living. Whether she's speaking in a whisper about leaving her children motherless, or delivering a manifesto on the downfalls of oncological training, what sets Dr. Yunus apart from other cancer chroniclers is her unsparing point of view and an affecting, crystalline voice. That voice guides the reader through a journey of her experience as a patient, in which she is forced to make a series of decisions that profoundly alter the trajectory of her life. When a biopsy reveals cancer in her liver in February 2016, Dr. Yunus is upgraded to Stage IV--terminal. She then begins a new arc of her narrative, a reckoning with life and death. Yet through it all, she maintains her dignity and strength, her composure and reason, while facing the unimaginable. "Left Boob Gone Rogue" is not just a book for cancer survivors and their families. It is for all of us who take each day for granted, who (waylaid by the hustle of everyday life) forget to reflect on our good fortune. It is a reminder that every moment should be appreciated and celebrated. That is Dr. Uzma Yunus' gift.
The world's greatest contrarian confronts his own death in this brave and unforgettable book. During the American book tour for his memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens collapsed in his hotel room with excruciating pain in his chest. As he would later write in the first of a series of deeply moving Vanity Fair pieces, he was being deported 'from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.' Over the next year he experienced the full force of modern cancer treatment. Mortality is at once an unsparingly honest account of the ravages of his disease, an examination of cancer etiquette, and the coda to a lifetime of fierce debate and peerless prose. In this moving personal account of illness, Hitchens confronts his own death - and he is combative and dignified, eloquent and witty to the very last.
A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.
Why do we get cancer? Is it our modern diets and unhealthy habits? Chemicals in the environment? An unwelcome genetic inheritance? Or is it just bad luck? The answer is all of these and none of them. We get cancer because we can't avoid it—it's a bug in the system of life itself. Cancer exists in nearly every animal and has afflicted humans as long as our species has walked the earth. In Rebel Cell: Cancer, Evolution, and the New Science of Life's Oldest Betrayal, Kat Arney reveals the secrets of our most formidable medical enemy, most notably the fact that it isn't so much a foreign invader as a double agent: cancer is hardwired into the fundamental processes of life. New evidence shows that this disease is the result of the same evolutionary changes that allowed us to thrive. Evolution helped us outsmart our environment, and it helps cancer outsmart its environment as well—alas, that environment is us. Explaining why "everything we know about cancer is wrong," Arney, a geneticist and award-winning science writer, guides readers with her trademark wit and clarity through the latest research into the cellular mavericks that rebel against the rigid biological "society" of the body and make a leap towards anarchy. We need to be a lot smarter to defeat such a wily foe—smarter even than Darwin himself. In this new world, where we know that every cancer is unique and can evolve its way out of trouble, the old models of treatment have reached their limits. But we are starting to decipher cancer's secret evolutionary playbook, mapping the landscapes in which these rogue cells survive, thrive, or die, and using this knowledge to predict and confound cancer's next move. Rebel Cell is a story about life and death, hope and hubris, nature and nurture. It's about a new way of thinking about what this disease really is and the role it plays in human life. Above all, it's a story about where cancer came from, where it's going, and how we can stop it.
"A devoted and brilliant achievement." The New York Review of Books In 1948, as civil war ravaged Greece, children were abducted and sent to communist "camps" behind the Iron Curtain. Eleni Gatzoyiannis, 41, defied the traditions of her small village and the terror of the communist insurgents to arrange for the escape of her three daughters and her son, Nicola. For that act, she was imprisoned, tortured, and executed in cold blood. Nicholas Gage joined his father in Massachusetts at the age of nine and grew up to be a top investigative reporter for the New York Times. And finally he returned to Greece to uncover the story he cared about most -- the story of his mother's heroic life and tragic death.
Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments—hailed by the New York Times for the renowned feminist author’s “mesmerizing, thrilling” truths within its pages—has been selected by the publication’s book critics as the #1 Best Memoir of the Past 50 Years. In this deeply etched and haunting memoir, Vivian Gornick tells the story of her lifelong battle with her mother for independence. There have been numerous books about mother and daughter, but none has dealt with this closest of filial relations as directly or as ruthlessly. Gornick’s groundbreaking book confronts what Edna O’Brien has called “the principal crux of female despair”: the unacknowledged Oedipal nature of the mother-daughter bond. Born and raised in the Bronx, the daughter of “urban peasants,” Gornick grows up in a household dominated by her intelligent but uneducated mother’s romantic depression over the early death of her husband. Next door lives Nettie, an attractive widow whose calculating sensuality appeals greatly to Vivian. These women with their opposing models of femininity continue, well into adulthood, to affect Gornick’s struggle to find herself in love and in work. As Gornick walks with her aged mother through the streets of New York, arguing and remembering the past, each wins the reader’s admiration: the caustic and clear-thinking daughter, for her courage and tenacity in really talking to her mother about the most basic issues of their lives, and the still powerful and intuitively-wise old woman, who again and again proves herself her daughter’s mother. Unsparing, deeply courageous, Fierce Attachments is one of the most remarkable documents of family feeling that has been written, a classic that helped start the memoir boom and remains one of the most moving examples of the genre. “[Gornick] stares unflinchingly at all that is hidden, difficult, strange, unresolvable in herself and others—at loneliness, sexual malice and the devouring, claustral closeness of mothers and daughters...[Fierce Attachments is] a portrait of the artist as she finds a language—original, allergic to euphemism and therapeutic banalities—worthy of the women that raised her.”—The New York Times
