Author: Tom Brokaw
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679604669
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • WITH A NEW PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR • A powerful memoir of a dramatic year spent battling cancer and reflecting on a long, happy, and lucky life—from the bestselling author of The Greatest Generation, whose iconic career in journalism has spanned more than fifty years Tom Brokaw has led a fortunate life, with a strong marriage and family, many friends, and a brilliant journalism career culminating in his twenty-two years as anchor of the NBC Nightly News and as bestselling author. But in the summer of 2013, when back pain led him to the doctors at the Mayo Clinic, his run of good luck was interrupted. He received shocking news: He had multiple myeloma, a treatable but incurable blood cancer. Friends had always referred to Brokaw’s “lucky star,” but as he writes in this inspiring memoir, “Turns out that star has a dimmer switch.” Brokaw takes us through all the seasons and stages of this surprising year, the emotions, discoveries, setbacks, and struggles—times of denial, acceptance, turning points, and courage. After his diagnosis, Brokaw began to keep a journal, approaching this new stage of his life in a familiar role: as a journalist, determined to learn as much as he could about his condition, to report the story, and help others facing similar battles. That journal became the basis of this wonderfully written memoir, the story of a man coming to terms with his own mortality, contemplating what means the most to him now, and reflecting on what has meant the most to him throughout his life. Brokaw also pauses to look back on some of the important moments in his career: memories of Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the morning of September 11, 2001, in New York City, and more. Through it all, Brokaw writes in the warm, intimate, natural voice of one of America’s most beloved journalists, giving us Brokaw on Brokaw, and bringing us with him as he navigates pain, procedures, drug regimens, and physical rehabilitation. Brokaw also writes about the importance of patients taking an active role in their own treatment, and of the vital role of caretakers and coordinated care. Generous, informative, and deeply human, A Lucky Life Interrupted offers a message of understanding and empowerment, resolve and reality, hope for the future and gratitude for a well-lived life. Praise for A Lucky Life Interrupted “It’s impossible not to be inspired by Brokaw’s story, and his willingness to share it.”—Los Angeles Times “A powerful memoir of battling cancer and facing mortality . . . Through the prism of his own illness, Brokaw looks at the larger picture of aging in America.”—Booklist (starred review) “Moving, informative and deeply personal.”—The Daily Beast “The former NBC News anchor has applied the fact-finding skills and straightforward candor that were his stock in trade during his reporting days to A Lucky Life Interrupted.”—USA Today “Brokaw doesn’t paste a smiley face on his story. Again and again, the book returns to stories of loss but also of grace, luck and the beauty of having another swing at bat.”—The Washington Post “Engaging . . . [with] the kind of insight that is typical of Mr. Brokaw’s approach to life and now to illness.”—The Wall Street Journal “Powerful and courageous . . . [Brokaw] looks ahead to the future with hope.”—Bookreporter

Author: Tom Brokaw
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812982088
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • WITH A NEW PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR • A powerful memoir of a dramatic year spent battling cancer and reflecting on a long, happy, and lucky life—from the bestselling author of The Greatest Generation, whose iconic career in journalism has spanned more than fifty years Tom Brokaw has led a fortunate life, with a strong marriage and family, many friends, and a brilliant journalism career culminating in his twenty-two years as anchor of the NBC Nightly News and as bestselling author. But in the summer of 2013, when back pain led him to the doctors at the Mayo Clinic, his run of good luck was interrupted. He received shocking news: He had multiple myeloma, a treatable but incurable blood cancer. Friends had always referred to Brokaw’s “lucky star,” but as he writes in this inspiring memoir, “Turns out that star has a dimmer switch.” Brokaw takes us through all the seasons and stages of this surprising year, the emotions, discoveries, setbacks, and struggles—times of denial, acceptance, turning points, and courage. After his diagnosis, Brokaw began to keep a journal, approaching this new stage of his life in a familiar role: as a journalist, determined to learn as much as he could about his condition, to report the story, and help others facing similar battles. That journal became the basis of this wonderfully written memoir, the story of a man coming to terms with his own mortality, contemplating what means the most to him now, and reflecting on what has meant the most to him throughout his life. Brokaw also pauses to look back on some of the important moments in his career: memories of Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the morning of September 11, 2001, in New York City, and more. Through it all, Brokaw writes in the warm, intimate, natural voice of one of America’s most beloved journalists, giving us Brokaw on Brokaw, and bringing us with him as he navigates pain, procedures, drug regimens, and physical rehabilitation. Brokaw also writes about the importance of patients taking an active role in their own treatment, and of the vital role of caretakers and coordinated care. Generous, informative, and deeply human, A Lucky Life Interrupted offers a message of understanding and empowerment, resolve and reality, hope for the future and gratitude for a well-lived life. Praise for A Lucky Life Interrupted “It’s impossible not to be inspired by Brokaw’s story, and his willingness to share it.”—Los Angeles Times “A powerful memoir of battling cancer and facing mortality . . . Through the prism of his own illness, Brokaw looks at the larger picture of aging in America.”—Booklist (starred review) “Moving, informative and deeply personal.”—The Daily Beast “The former NBC News anchor has applied the fact-finding skills and straightforward candor that were his stock in trade during his reporting days to A Lucky Life Interrupted.”—USA Today “Brokaw doesn’t paste a smiley face on his story. Again and again, the book returns to stories of loss but also of grace, luck and the beauty of having another swing at bat.”—The Washington Post “Engaging . . . [with] the kind of insight that is typical of Mr. Brokaw’s approach to life and now to illness.”—The Wall Street Journal “Powerful and courageous . . . [Brokaw] looks ahead to the future with hope.”—Bookreporter

Author: Suleika Jaouad
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781496181244
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
A compilation of articles written by and about Suleika Jaouad and a journey through cancer from age 22."My life was interrupted overnight. But guess what? That interruption was the best thing that's ever happened to me. I would never go so far as to say "cancer is a gift." It's not. And I've seen it take way too many lives, way too soon. But when I found out I had cancer, I also began to find my voice."

Author: Suleika Jaouad
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0399588590
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission to re-entry into “normal” life—from the author of the Life, Interrupted column in The New York Times ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Rumpus, She Reads, Library Journal, Booklist • “I was immersed for the whole ride and would follow Jaouad anywhere. . . . Her writing restores the moon, lights the way as we learn to endure the unknown.”—Chanel Miller, The New York Times Book Review “Beautifully crafted . . . affecting . . . a transformative read . . . Jaouad’s insights about the self, connectedness, uncertainty and time speak to all of us.”—The Washington Post In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world.” She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone. It started with an itch—first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times. When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward—after countless rounds of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant—she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal—to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live. How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked—with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt—on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.

Author: Joshua Cody
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408815206
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Joshua Cody was about to receive his PhD from Columbia University when he was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. He underwent six months of chemotherapy. The treatment failed. Expectations for survival plummeted. After consulting with several oncologists, he embarked on a risky course of high-dose chemotherapy, full body radiation, and an autologous bone marrow transplant. In a fevered, mesmerising voice, slaloming effortlessly between references to Ezra Pound, The Rolling Stones and Beethoven, he charts the struggle: the fury, the tendancy to self-destruction, the ruthless grasping for life, for sensation - he beautiful Ariel who gives him cocaine and a blowjob in a Manhattan restaurant following his first treatment; the detailed Hungarian morphine fantasy complete with bride called Valentina while, in reality, hospital staff are pinning him to his bed. As fresh and beguiling as it is brave and revealing, Joshua Cody has created a book that gives readers a long glimpse into a gorgeous, dark thrashing in the forecourt of death. Literary, hallucinatory and at times uncomfortable reading, [sic] is ultimately a celebration of art, language music and life.

Author: Susanna Kaysen
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0804151113
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
30th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. Her memoir of the next two years is a "poignant, honest ... triumphantly funny ... and heartbreaking story" (The New York Times Book Review). WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR The ward for teenage girls in the McLean psychiatric hospital was as renowned for its famous clientele—Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles—as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary. Kaysen's memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a "parallel universe" set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties. Girl, Interrupted is a clear-sighted, unflinching document that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.

Author: Laurie Edwards
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0802779735
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Twenty-seven-year-old Laurie Edwards is one of 125 million Americans who have a chronic illness, in her case a rare genetic respiratory disease. Because of medical advances in the treatment of serious childhood diseases, 600,000 chronically ill teens enter adulthood every year who decades ago would not have survived-they and people diagnosed in adulthood face the same challenges of college, career, and starting a family as others in their twenties and thirties, but with the added circumstance of having chronic illness. Life Disrupted is a personal and unflinching guide to living well with a chronic illness: managing your own health care without letting it take over your life, dealing with difficult doctors and frequent hospitalizations, having a productive and satisfying career that accommodates your health needs, and nurturing friendships and a loving, committed relationship regardless of recurring health problems. Laurie Edwards also addresses the particular needs of people who have more than one chronic illness or who are among the twenty-five million Americans with a rare disorder. She shares her own story and the experiences of others with chronic illness, as well as advice from life coaches, employment specialists, and health professionals. Reading Life Disrupted is like having a best friend and mentor who truly does know what you're going through.

Author: Kenny Rogers
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062071602
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
A living legend of Country Music and a worldwide music icon, superstar Kenny Rogers has enjoyed a fascinating five decades in show business, and he tells the full story of his remarkable life and career in Luck or Something Like It. From his days with hit group The First Edition to his sterling solo work, the artist who "knows when to hold 'em and knows when to fold 'em" knows how to tell a captivating life story as well–bringing a golden era of Country Music to life as he recounts his remarkable rise to the top of the charts. An honest, moving, eye-opening view of a musician's life on the road, Luck or Something Like It is the definitive music memoir–a backstage pass to fifty years of performing and recording presented by the one and only Kenny Rogers, one of the bestselling artists ever.

Author: Sam Falle
Publisher: Guild (WI)
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description

Author: Éva Fahidi
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487536267
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
An exceptional document of an extraordinary life, The Soul of Things is the memoir of Holocaust survivor Éva Fahidi. Since the memoir was first published in Hungarian in 2004 under the title Anima Rerum, Fahidi has become a household name in Hungary and in Germany. Featured in countless interviews and several prize-winning documentary films, at the age of ninety-five she is a frequent speaker at Holocaust commemorations in Hungary, Germany, and elsewhere. The Soul of Things combines a rare depiction of upper-middle-class Jewish life in pre-war Hungary with the chronicle of a woman’s deportation and survival in the camps. Fahidi is a gifted writer with a unique voice, full of wisdom, humanity, and flashes of dark humour. With an unsentimental, philosophical perspective, she recounts her journey from the Great Hungarian Plain to the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the forced labour camp of Münchmühle, and back. The English edition includes a new introduction by historians Éva Kovács and Judith Szapor, the original prefaces to the Hungarian and German editions, an essay on the Münchmüle Camp by Fritz Brinkman-Frisch, and extensive notes providing historical and cultural context for Fahidi’s narrative.