Showing posts with label illness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label illness. Show all posts
May 1, 2016
May 1, 2015
Fatal fever - Gail Jarrow
Summary: Chronicles the story of the early 1900s typhoid fever epidemic in New York, providing details as to how its infamous carrier was ultimately tracked down and stopped.
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* The name Typhoid Mary lives on, but those of George Soper, Sara Josephine Baker, and Mary Mallon are relatively unknown. In this thoroughly researched book, Jarrow tells their intertwined stories. Beginning in 1906, Soper, an engineer and chemist known as a "germ detective," tied several typhoid outbreaks to Mallon, an Irish cook who was a typhoid carrier. Baker, a public health doctor in New York City, led the Department of Health's efforts to test Mallon for the disease. Feisty, uncooperative, and apparently healthy, Mallon repeatedly resisted officials and never accepted that she had infected dozens of people, including several who died. After a dramatic opening scene in which Mallon flees from health officials, Jarrow backtracks to 1903, when Soper investigated a typhoid outbreak in Ithaca, New York. Here she introduces the disease, its consequences for the community, and the growing role of government in public health, topics she later develops more fully. The writing is lucid, well organized, and informative. The book's large format allows for excellent reproductions of the many period photos, prints, and documents. Readers who are curious about Typhoid Mary, including those who enjoyed Julie Chibbaro's historical novel Deadly (2011), will find this an absorbing account of what actually happened. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.
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The sound of a wild snail eating - Elisabeth Tova Bailey
Summary: Summary: Bedridden and suffering from a neurological disorder, the author recounts the profound effect on her life caused by a gift of a snail in a potted plant and shares the lessons learned from her new companion about her the meaning of her life and the life of the small creature.
Staff Review:
When I brought this book home, I was greeted with an incredulous look - "YOU are going to read a book about a SNAIL?" Snails have not been my favorite creature, to say the least. However, this book was really very charming and lovely. The author's bed-ridden state allows her to observe the little creature that was brought into her room via a potted plant, and it becomes her little pet. Really well written, and really a delight.
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Nov 1, 2014
The Fault in Our Stars - John Green
Summary: Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few more years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis, but when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at the Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel's story is about to be completely rewritten.
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* At 16, Hazel Grace Lancaster, a three-year stage IV–cancer survivor, is clinically depressed. To help her deal with this, her doctor sends her to a weekly support group where she meets Augustus Waters, a fellow cancer survivor, and the two fall in love. Both kids are preternaturally intelligent, and Hazel is fascinated with a novel about cancer called An Imperial Affliction. Most particularly, she longs to know what happened to its characters after an ambiguous ending. To find out, the enterprising Augustus makes it possible for them to travel to Amsterdam, where Imperial's author, an expatriate American, lives. What happens when they meet him must be left to readers to discover. Suffice it to say, it is significant. Writing about kids with cancer is an invitation to sentimentality and pathos—or worse, in unskilled hands, bathos. Happily, Green is able to transcend such pitfalls in his best and most ambitious novel to date. Beautifully conceived and executed, this story artfully examines the largest possible considerations—life, love, and death—with sensitivity, intelligence, honesty, and integrity. In the process, Green shows his readers what it is like to live with cancer, sometimes no more than a breath or a heartbeat away from death. But it is life that Green spiritedly celebrates here, even while acknowledging its pain. In its every aspect, this novel is a triumph.
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May 1, 2014
Maybe one day - Melissa Kantor
Summary: "Zoe thought that being cut from her ballet program was the worst thing that could hapen, but when her best friend, Olivia, is diagnosed with a life-threatening disease, Zoe quickly learns that not being able to dance is the least of her problems"-- Provided by publisher.
Booklist Reviews
The worst thing ever happens to forever friends Olivia and Zoe when they are cut from their prestigious ballet troupe. Livvie joins other activities, but Zoe is adrift without the one thing that mattered to her. Then Livvie is diagnosed with leukemia, and Zoe's life is fractured once again. She spends as much time as possible with Livvie, while needing to keep up at school and navigating the growing connection between herself and Calvin, Livvie's crush. Kantor ably steers the reader through the intensity of Zoe's brief life-changing experience, weaving in realistic high-school dynamics and Zoe's search for anything to take her mind off her sadness. What she finds is solace by subbing for Livvie at the beginning ballet classes at a community center and kissing Calvin any chance she gets. Though this contemporary cancer story laced with everyday and extraordinary experiences will undoubtedly draw comparisons to that other cancer book, Livvie's cancer story and Zoe's emotionally complex web of friendship, fear, loss, love, pain, have their own appeal, and are well worth reading. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.
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Apr 1, 2013
The end of your life book club - Will Schwalbe
Summary: Recounts how the author and his mother read and discussed books during her chemotherapy treatments, describing how the activity involved a wide range of literary genres, furthered their appreciation for literature, and strengthened their bond. - (Baker & Taylor)
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Schwalbe and his mother accidentally formed a book club in a cancer-treatment waiting room. As they discuss what they will read while Mary Anne is treated for pancreatic cancer, they deepen their already strong relationship. Schwalbe didn't plan to write this memoir as he was living it, so it's mostly nuggets of emotionally important remarks in the context of the development of his mother's illness. Will's love and respect for his mother shine through in the story of a remarkable woman's life, from how she helped refugees to her seeking to build libraries in Afghanistan. With 21 years of book-publishing experience, Schwalbe quickly introduces the books themselves in one or two paragraphs. The works they read offer a way to approach topics they otherwise wouldn't discuss, and the focus is more on what the books reveal than what happens in them. This touching and insightful memoir about the slow process of dying will appeal to readers of Tuesdays with Morrie (1997) and The Last Lecture (2008) but also to people who love delving into books and book discussions. Like Mary Anne, who reads the ending first, you know how this book is going to end, but although it is a story about death, it is mostly a celebration of life and of the way books can enrich it. Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.
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Jan 1, 2013
Joy for beginners - Erica Bauermeister
Summary: Six women gather to celebrate their friend Kate's recovery from cancer, where she strikes a bargain with them: to celebrate her new lease on life, she'll do the one thing that's always terrified her, but if she does, each of them will also do one thing that they'd find difficult.
Publishers Weekly Reviews
In Bauermeister's sensual second novel, a party for a woman who has beaten breast cancer results in six friends reconnecting, not just to each other but also to parts of themselves they had long neglected. Admittedly an "incongruous group," with each woman at a different point in her life, Kate's friends agree that each "will do one thing in the next year that is scary or difficult." Kate selects tasks for each of her friends; undertaking the tasks will bring heartbreak, joy, and adventure to everyone. Bauermeister's (The School of Essential Ingredients) evocative prose creates a magical world where gray goo becomes "forgiving dough" in an oven and a woman protects herself from loneliness by hiding in an unruly garden. Kate's well-meaning tasks, be they as grand as a trip to Venice or as banal as baking bread, push the friends toward much-needed awakenings. A book designed to both fill you up and make you hungry for life. (June)
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