Download or read book The Adventures of Cancer Bitch written by S.L. Wisenberg and published by Tortoise Books. This book was released on 2024-10-15 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: S.L. Wisenberg, known for writing that is “seriously funny,” proves in this acerbic chronicle that a cancer diary can be at once hilarious, rageful, and feminist. She passes through the expected rites of breast cancer—diagnosis, surgery, and chemotherapy—but her responses are less expected: she throws a farewell party for her left breast, and rejects a “cranial prosthesis” in favor of using her bare scalp as a canvas for political messages. She insightfully criticizes the ad campaigns of cancer charities, the inept medical staff, and the inequities in the U.S. health care system she encounters as she navigates daily life with cancer and chemo. (There is much she disapproves of, from Brazilian waxes to books that blame patients for their own diseases.) Drawing on a wealth of personal, literary, and historical sources, The Adventures of Cancer Bitch creates an indelible image of a politically engaged, self-aware woman facing a daunting disease while examining her soul and society. (And riding the subway and teaching one-breasted.) It’s a thought-provoking memoir from a woman who questions everything and everyone, including herself. This revised and expanded second edition features new observations and reflections from the author.
Download or read book Reading and Writing Cancer How Words Heal written by Susan Gubar and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-05-17 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An important addition to the literature of cancer by an award-winning scholar and memoirist. Elaborating upon her “Living with Cancer” column in the New York Times, Susan Gubar helps patients, caregivers, and the specialists who seek to serve them. In a book both enlightening and practical, she describes how the activities of reading and writing can right some of cancer’s wrongs. To stimulate the writing process, she proposes specific exercises, prompts, and models. In discussions of the diary of Fanny Burney, the stories of Leo Tolstoy and Alice Munro, numerous memoirs, novels, paintings, photographs, and blogs, Gubar shows how readers can learn from art that deepens our comprehension of what it means to live or die with the disease. From a writer whose own memoir, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer, was described by the New York Times Book Review as “moving and instructive…and incredibly brave,” this volume opens a path to healing.
Download or read book Mammographies written by Mary K. DeShazer and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2018-05-09 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While breast cancer continues to affect the lives of millions, contemporary writers and artists have responded to the ravages of the disease in creative expression. Mary K. DeShazer’s book looks specifically at breast cancer memoirs and photographic narratives, a category she refers to as mammographies, signifying both the imaging technology by which most Western women discover they have this disease and the documentary imperatives that drive their written and visual accounts of it. Mammographies argues that breast cancer narratives of the past ten years differ from their predecessors in their bold address of previously neglected topics such as the link between cancer and environmental carcinogens, the ethics and efficacy of genetic testing and prophylactic mastectomy, and the shifting politics of prosthesis and reconstruction. Mammographies is distinctive among studies of contemporary illness narratives in its exclusive focus on breast cancer, its analysis of both memoirs and photographic texts, its attention to hybrid and collaborative narratives, and its emphasis on ecological, genetic, transnational, queer, and anti-pink discourses. DeShazer’s methodology—best characterized as literary critical, feminist, and interdisciplinary—includes detailed interpretation of the narrative strategies, thematic contours, and visual imagery of a wide range of contemporary breast cancer memoirs and photographic anthologies. The author explores the ways in which the narratives constitute a distinctive testimonial and memorial tradition, a claim supported by close readings and theoretical analysis that demonstrates how these narratives question hegemonic cultural discourses, empower reader-viewers as empathic witnesses, and provide communal sites for mourning, resisting, and remembering.
Download or read book Cancer Is a Bitch written by Gail Konop Baker and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-06-29 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gail Konop Baker was a runner, yoga practitioner, doctor's wife, and lifelong subscriber to Prevention magazine. But right before her forty-sixth birthday, she heard the words that would forever change her life: Just to be safe, I think we should biopsy. It was the beginning of her yearlong battle with breast cancer and its fallout - a battle that would upstage any midlife crisis she'd worried was waiting in the wings. Cancer Is a Bitch is her raw, moving, and funny account of juggling midlife, motherhood, and marriage with a rogue boob - and, ultimately, triumphing. It will, as author Lolly Winston said, ''crack [you] up one minute, then bring [you] to tears the next.''
Download or read book Hey Cancer You Picked the Wrong Bitch written by Inkbooks Inkbooks and published by . This book was released on 2019-07-11 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book to write down your feelings while fighting against the disgusting cancer. Write your wishes, your ambitions and all your thoughts in a beautiful notebook. You know you're not going to let breast cancer beat you!
Download or read book From Whispers to Shouts written by Elaine Schattner and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-07 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It’s hard today to remember how recently cancer was a silent killer, a dreaded disease about which people rarely spoke in public. In hospitals and doctors’ offices, conversations about malignancy were hushed and hope was limited. In this deeply researched book, Elaine Schattner reveals a sea change—from before 1900 to the present day—in how ordinary people talk about cancer. From Whispers to Shouts examines public perception of cancer through stories in newspapers and magazines, social media, and popular culture. It probes the evolving relationship between journalists and medical specialists and illuminates the role of women and charities that distributed medical information. Schattner traces the origins of patient advocacy and activism from the 1920s onward, highlighting how, while doctors have lost control of messages about cancer, survivors have gained visibility and voice. The book’s final section lays out provocative questions facing the cancer community today—including distrust of oncologists, concerns over financial burdens, and disparities in cancer treatments and care. Schattner considers how patients and their loved ones struggle to make decisions amid conflicting information and opinions. She explores the ramifications of so much openness, good and bad, and asks: Has awareness backfired? Instead, Schattner contends, we need greater understanding of cancer’s treatability.
Download or read book The Thin Ledge written by Daniel Shapiro and published by Greenleaf Book Group. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What would you do if the person you love became someone else? In this profoundly honest memoir, Daniel P. Shapiro shares the reality of living through his wife’s mental and physical decline caused by a devastating illness. Shapiro was a successful attorney in his early forties when his wife, Susan, suffered a brain bleed and a diagnosis that her future was uncertain. Stunned, and with three young children, the couple made the most of the few years that followed, before a massive second hemorrhage changed everything. Physically, Susan was badly compromised in her ability to speak, see, and walk. Mentally, she spiraled into depression and experienced a drastic personality change. The Thin Ledge is about coping (often unsuccessfully) with the wreckage left in the wake of an illness that destroys a loved one. Shapiro addresses the questions that people living through unspeakable tragedy may never mention, but almost always ask.
Download or read book Brief Encounters A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction written by Judith Kitchen and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2015-11-09 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The best of short literary memoirs, essays, and reflections, many of which were written expressly for this collection. Also available The late Judith Kitchen, editor of the perennially popular anthologies Short Takes, In Short, and In Brief, was greatly influential in recognizing and establishing flash creative nonfiction as a form in its own right. In Brief Encounters, she and writer/editor/actor Dinah Lenney expand this vibrant field with nearly eighty new selections: shorts—as these sharply focused pieces have come to be known— representing an impressive range of voices, perspectives, sensibilities, and forms. Brief Encounters features the work of the emerging and the established—including Stuart Dybek, Roxanne Gay, Eduardo Galeano, Leslie Jamison, and Julian Barnes—arranged by theme to explore the human condition in ways intimate, idiosyncratic, funny, sad, provocative, lyrical, unflinching. From the rant to the rave, the meditation to the polemic, the confession to the valediction, this collection of shorts—this celebration of true and vivid prose—will enlarge your world.
Download or read book Now Write Nonfiction written by Sherry Ellis and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-12-24 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential handbook for nonfiction writers, featuring the trusted personal writing exercises of today's masters of creative non-fiction, including Gay Talese, Reza Aslan, John Matteson, Tilar Mazzeo, and many more! Beginners and seasoned writers alike will relish the opportunity to use the top-notch writing exercises collected in Now Write! Nonfiction culled from the personal stashes of bestselling and critically-acclaimed nonfiction authors like legendary essayist Gay Talese (Thy Neighbor's Wife), New York Times-bestselling authors Ishmael Beah (A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier) Reza Aslan (No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam), and Tilar Mazzeo (The Widow Clicquot), 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winner John Matteson (Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father), creative nonfiction icon Lee Gutkind (Creative Nonfiction magazine), and many other top memoirists, journalists, and teachers of creative nonfiction, these exercises offer fresh ideas for every facet of creative nonfiction writing, from pushing through writers block to organizing a story, capturing character to fine-tuning dialogue, injecting new life into a finished piece to starting a new work from scratch. Now Write! Nonfiction will take you out into the field with creative nonfiction's master practitioners: *Peek inside Gay Talese's mind, as he shares the "writer's road map" he used to organize information for his classic book Thy Neighbor's Wife and his seminal essay "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." *Learn from Reza Aslan why what you remember isn't as important as why you remember it the way you do *Explore the importance of cultural nuance in language with Ishmael Beah *Discover Lee Gutkind's simple trick, performed with a highlighter, that can help any writer identify whether their piece is truly showing action, or just telling An essential resource that will help writers of any level to hone their craft and get writing, Now WRite! Nonfiction offers over 80 quick, simple excersises trusted by top nonfiction writers to get their pen moving!
Download or read book Cancer Vixen written by Marisa Acocella Marchetto and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The groundbreaking graphic memoir that inspires breast cancer patients to fight back—and do so with style. • “Powerful … A vibrant, neon chronicle with plenty of attitude … A triumph of imagination and spirit.” —Los Angeles Times “What happens when a shoe-crazy, lipstick-obsessed, wine-swilling, pasta-slurping, fashion-fanatic, about-to-get-married big-city girl cartoonist with a fabulous life finds ... a lump in her breast?” That’s the question that sets this powerful, funny, and poignant graphic memoir in motion. In vivid color and with a taboo-breaking sense of humor, Marisa Acocella Marchetto tells the story of her eleven-month, ultimately triumphant bout with breast cancer—from diagnosis to cure, and every challenging step in between.
Download or read book White Matter written by Janet Sternburg and published by Hawthorne Books. This book was released on 2015-08-17 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: White Matter: A Memoir of Family and Medicine is the story of a Bostonian close-knit Jewish working-class family of five sisters and one brother and the impact they and their next generation endured due to the popularization of lobotomy during the 20th century. When Janet Sternburg’s grandfather abandoned his family, and her uncle, Bennie, became increasing mentally ill, Sternburg’s mother and aunts had to bind together and make crucial decisions for the family’s survival. Two of the toughest familial decisions they made were to have Bennie undergo a lobotomy to treat his schizophrenia and later to have youngest sister, Francie, undergo the same procedure to treat severe depression. Both heartrending decisions were largely a result of misinformation disseminated that popularized and legitimized lobotomy. Woven into Sternburg’s story are notable figures that influenced the family as well as the entire medical field. In 1949, Egas Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for developing the lobotomy, and in the three years that followed his acceptance of the award, more Americans underwent the surgery than during the previous 14 years. By the early 1950s, Walter Freeman developed an alternate technique for lobotomy, which he proselytized during his travels throughout the country in a van he dubbed the “Lobotomobile.” The phrase “prefrontal lobotomy” was common currency growing up in Janet Sternburg’s family and in White Matter she details this scientific discovery that disconnects the brain’s white matter, leaving a person without feelings, and its undeserved legitimization and impact on her family. She writes as a daughter consumed with questions about her mother and aunts—all well meaning women who decided their siblings’ mental health issues would be best treated with lobotomies. By the late 1970s, the surgical practice was almost completely out of favor, but its effects left patients and their families with complicated legacies as well as a stain on American medical history. Every generation has to make its own medical choices based on knowledge that will inevitably come to seem inadequate in the future. How do we live with our choices when we see their consequences?
Download or read book Cancer and All the Other Shit written by Lauren Wepa and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 51 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Hi, I'm a cancer kid. It was February 2013 when cancer became part of my life. I was 20 years old - two months from hitting the big two- one - and it ruined everything. Cancer really is a bitch like that. When it drops by, everything stops for it. Not only does it attack the body but it has the power to isolate people as well. Talking about cancer is tough and will test you. However talking is one of the small things that helps us feel normal - whatever that is. Just like a balloon, all it takes is a breath to begin to fill the awkward silence. Lauren WepaThis book is a permission slip from a cancer patient to family and friends to talk - we all know cancer's a bitch so why not bitch about it?"--Back cover."Hi, I'm a cancer kid. It was February 2013 when cancer became part of my life. I was 20 years old - two months from hitting the big two- one - and it ruined everything. Cancer really is a bitch like that. When it drops by, everything stops for it. Not only does it attack the body but it has the power to isolate people as well. Talking about cancer is tough and will test you. However talking is one of the small things that helps us feel normal - whatever that is. Just like a balloon, all it takes is a breath to begin to fill the awkward silence. Lauren WepaThis book is a permission slip from a cancer patient to family and friends to talk - we all know cancer's a bitch so why not bitch about it?"--Back cover.
Download or read book Adventures in Breast Cancer written by Carol Timms and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2011-02-07 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the cure for cancer? Life. That's right, life. Filled to the brim with laughter, tears, courage and more laughter. Adventures in Breast Cancer contains a full dose of life. Readers are invited to join in an irreverent journey covering diagnosis, surgery, treatment and recovery. Learn what to expect, the questions to ask and how to cope using the power of laughter.
Download or read book Happiness for Beginners written by Katherine Center and published by St. Martin's Griffin. This book was released on 2015-03-24 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As seen on Netflix - from the New York Times bestselling author of The Bodyguard and Hello Stranger Helen Carpenter can’t quite seem to bounce back. Newly divorced at thirty-two, her life has fallen apart beyond her ability to put it together again. So when her annoying younger brother, Duncan, convinces her to sign up for a hardcore wilderness survival course in the backwoods of Wyoming—she hopes it’ll be exactly what she needs. Instead, it’s a disaster. It’s nothing like she wants, or expects, or anticipates. She doesn’t anticipate the surprise summer blizzard, for example—or the blisters, or the rutting elk, or the mean pack of sorority girls. And she especiallydoesn’t anticipate that her annoying brother’s even-more-annoying best friend, Jake, will show up for the exact same course—and distract her, derail her, and . . . kiss her. But it turns out sometimes disaster can teach you exactly the things you need to learn. Like how to keep going, even when you think you can’t. How being scared can make you brave. And how sometimes getting really, really lost is your only hope of getting found. Happiness for Beginners is Katherine Center at her most heart-warming, captivating best—a nourishing, page-turning, up-all-night read about how to get back up. It’s a story that looks at how our struggles lead us to our strengths. How love is always worth it. And how the more good things we look for, the more we find.
Download or read book Rainbows Lollipops Tough Bitches Fight Cancer written by Cara Riggs and published by Strategic Book Publishing & Rights Agency. This book was released on 2016-06-13 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rainbows, Lollipops & Tough Bitches Fight Cancer presents sentiments associated with the cancer journey. From diagnosis, through treatment and remission, emotions range from joy, stupidity, fear, faith, humor, darkness and rebirth, all told in short stories by women. “When I first heard the word CANCER in my own diagnosis, I felt an enormous challenge ahead of me. This was potentially the worst enemy I could ever foresee battling. Instead, my faith and my personal mantra, Nothing Is Everything, became more real to me as I came to regard this challenge as a triumph and just another phase of my life … but not the total sum of my life. Trust me … the amazing stories in Rainbows, Lollipops & Tough Bitches Fight Cancer put together with such thoughtfulness will lift you, amuse you and probably make you cry. Such a perfect gift for the newly diagnosed or anyone connected to the cancer journey.” – Camille Moten, singer, actress, author of Nothing Is Everything
Download or read book Dig in Your Heels written by Karla Antoinette Baptiste and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The uplifting memoir of one woman's triumph over breast cancer-from diagnosis to the coveted five-year cancer-free anniversary. When Karla Antoinette Baptiste was first diagnosed, she began reading breast cancer memoirs but was always left wondering what happened next. What should I expect after treatment? What will my "new normal" be like? Her own story answers those questions and so much more. Written with humor and humility, Karla's story is woven with themes of love, trust, and spiritual faith-and the importance of becoming a force in breast cancer advocacy. It offers valuable information and resources for breast health, and provides support, inspiration, and hope for those facing breast cancer. From her adventures in Paris to her roller-coaster relationship with her ex-husband, Karla's memoir is more than radiation and chemotherapy. In Dig in Your Heels, she urges women to educate themselves and draw upon their inner strength-the best is yet to come!
Download or read book Henry Kaplan and the Story of Hodgkin s Disease written by Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-28 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “compelling—and wonderfully told” biography of the American physician who pioneered a treatment for a cancer of lymph tissue (Wall Street Journal). In the 1950s, ninety-five percent of patients with Hodgkin’s disease, a cancer of lymph tissue which afflicts young adults, died. Today most are cured, due mainly to the efforts of Dr. Henry Kaplan. Henry Kaplan and the Story of Hodgkin’s Disease explores the life of this multifaceted, internationally known radiation oncologist, called a “saint” by some, a “malignant son of a bitch” by others. Kaplan’s passion to cure cancer dominated his life and helped him weather the controversy that marked each of his innovations, but it extracted a high price, leaving casualties along the way. Most never knew of his family struggles, his ill-fated love affair with Stanford University, or the humanitarian efforts that imperiled him. Today, Kaplan ranks as one of the foremost physician-scientists in the history of cancer medicine. In this book Charlotte Jacobs gives us the first account of a remarkable man who changed the face of cancer therapy and the history of a once fatal, now curable, cancer. She presents a dual drama—the biography of this renowned man who called cancer his “Moby Dick” and the history of Hodgkin’s disease, the malignancy he set out to annihilate. The book recounts the history of Hodgkin’s disease, first described in 1832: the key figures, the serendipitous discoveries of radiation and chemotherapy, the improving cure rates, the unanticipated toxicities. The lives of individual patients, bold enough to undergo experimental therapies, lend poignancy to the successes and failures. Praise for Henry Kaplan and the Story of Hodgkin’s Disease “Very few biographies so fully chronicle an important period of medical history as this outstanding book by Jacobs. Clearly and concisely written, this is the life story of a 20th-century force of nature . . . . Highly recommended.” —CHOICE “Dr. Jacobs’s book is a riveting read, meticulously covering a time of dramatic creativity in American medicine while also revealing the personal infighting that took place behind the scenes.” —The Pharos “A great read for those of us who trained in an era of evidence-based medicine, and want to learn what it was like to actually create the evidence, and for the first time make a difference in our patient’s lives.” —Oncology Times
