Here and Now: Inspiring Stories of Cancer Survivors

Rating:
Summary: Read this book
Review: Everything the earlier revieiwers have said is true. This book inspired me to live my life more fully. You do not need to be a cancer survivor to be touched by these stories. They are stories about being human, and being ALIVE.

Rating:
Summary: Telling It Like It Is.
Review: I am a cancer survivor and a personal coach for cancer survivors ([e-mail]). I have recommended this book to all of my clients. The stories tell it like it is: the good, bad and ugly. It's so important for current cancer patients to see the possibilites through the angst of having cancer and cancer survivors to have examples of the various tribulations and exhilaration of "cancer after life." cancer (little "c") is what you have, not who you are. I thank the authors for this beautiful and powerful evidence of the human spirit.

Rating:
Summary: A welcome Honesty
Review: What characterizes this book is its intellectual and emotional honesty, and in that spirit, this reviewer acknowledges he knows one of the authors.

The book tells the stories of 38 cancer survivors-38 very different individuals with very different stories to tell about how they first learned of their cancer, how they coped with it, how it changed their lives, how they face the world now.

There is no false sentimentality, there's no polyanna, no posing. This is truth, not always pretty, but real. The two authors, themselves cancer survivors, have produced something that is greater than the sum of its 38 brief narratives. There is a powerful cumulative impact on the reader that lingers.

What I was left with was a recognition that all of the very intense personal experiences these people had, making each one of them so very special, ultimately makes them very ordinary, just like you and me. And the scary, diagnostic names of their cancers also become strangely ordinary in their hideousness.

These survivors tell us about themselves very simply; they demystify themselves. And they demystify the pathology of cancer. Ultimately the reader gets to see beyond the emotional fall-out of confronting cancer--the fears, the feelings of hurt and unfairness, of rejection, of loneliness, and so many more.

This is a fine book. I'm sure it will have special meaning for both cancer survivors and cancer victims alike. But just as importantly, for many of us who are neither of these, it also helps us better understand ourselves. "The proper study of mankind is man," said Alexander Pope. You might adapt that truism to the study of mankind through this book.