Staying Alive: A Family Memoir

Rating:
Summary: Staying Alive
Review: Beautifully written book about the struggles of a family with a history of cancer. It was informative, heartwarming and at the same time heartbreaking to read about the three sisters and how they struggled and lost their fight against Cancer. The book told how much courage Janet's Mother (Regina) and her two sisters Fannie and Mary had in their battle. I learned how much medical procedures have advanced since the depression-era. It is also a compelling story of how Janet Reibstein (the author) took a pro-active role in beating the cancer for herself. I would highly recommend this book to anyone facing this challenge and their families as well. It also describes how it affects the whole family and how they cope with all of these emotions.

Rating:
Summary: Intelligent Hope
Review: Once upon a time there were three beautiful sisters: that's how fairy stories ae supposed to begin. And that is how in the real world the story of life in America did begin, for the daughters of one Jewish-American family, Mary, Fannie and Regina. But there was a secret darkening the future that awaited these sisters, a secret that had followed them from Europe and from the past. It is the gradual unfolding of this secret, that Janet Reibstein, the daughter of Regina, tracks as finally it comes to play out in her own generation too.

Looking back with the intensity of a child's vision, she recreates a world, so that we too relish its fabrics, its colours and textures. She makes the pleasure in clothes and dress that the sisters shared live again for us to share. And she also invites us to share her own journey within that family, as one by one her aunts and even her own mother arre diagnosed with the same illness, breast cancer. But instead of a story of doom, Staying Alive is a story of survival, of proactive, intelligent struggle.

You can read this book with pleasure as a family memoir exploring the generations in an American immigrant family. But what makes it truly compelling is the insight it offers into the relationship between mother and daughter, between Regina and Janet, both clearly extraordinary women but like so many mothers and daughters often painfully at odds.The sensitivity with which Reibstein reconstructs her mother's inner life using her last journals bears witness though to the strength of the bond between them.

Regina is the last of the sisters to be diagnosed; time and methods of treatment have moved on and these allow her to live to the age of sixty-four. How Janet herself copes as a grown woman with the threat posed by her genetic inheritance is the thread which carries the story into the present. Her own struggle against fear and her determination to obtain the very best advice concerning the treatment of breast cancer make this a book to put into the hands of any woman who ;has been diagnosed or who lives in fear of such a diagnosis.

I learned a lot from this book, not least about mothers and daughters-and I loved the clothes.

Rating:
Summary: Revealing and engrossing
Review: This family memory of overcoming sickness recounts the experiences of the author, who decided to undergo radical surgery in an effort to prevent the cancer diagnosis and death which had plagued women of her family for decades. Their terrible legacy and suffering caused the author to make a painful decision which would change her life. Staying Alive is revealing and engrossing.