A tough-talking but ultimately tender guide to dealing with a diagnosis.
An overview of the American hospital experience.
“Disease comes with a heavy set of burdens, but it also comes with impossibly beautiful gifts,” writes Snow (CEO of patient engagement agency Snow Companies) in this narrative built around her own multiple sclerosis diagnosis and its aftermath. “As the patient evolves, their loved ones must evolve, too. That means the burdens are shared—and so are the gifts.” This sense of hope found in horrible circumstances animates the book, which starts with illness bringing the author’s old life to a halt: “I’d gone from a vibrant, active, intelligent, engaged person, to someone who couldn’t get out of bed,” she writes. “And when I brought all these symptoms to various doctors, I was misdiagnosed, I was trivialized and placated, and one even said I was crazy.” From her own experiences, Snow has developed a process she calls “The Patient’s Journey.” In these pages, she breaks down what both the patient and the patient’s support group will go through pre-diagnosis, post-diagnosis, and in the long-term. The guide walks readers through the experience of hunting down the appropriate care, finding the right diagnosis, dealing with the slow kind of grief that illness can induce (“the initial grief that comes with a diagnosis is often coupled with relief to finally have a name for what you’re dealing with”), separating one’s self from one’s illness, and many other aspects of this kind of crisis. Snow employs a blunt prose style in an attempt to underscore both the practicalities and the empathy of her narrative, and it largely works—her text is free of the impersonal, anodyne tone that often characterizes books about coping with sickness. “Illness is brutal,” she writes, “but when you start finding ways to give back to others, that impact makes it all easier to bear.” Readers dealing with illness—their own or a loved one’s—will find this book to be a breath of fresh air and a realistic shot of hope.
A tough-talking but ultimately tender guide to dealing with a diagnosis.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9798891381957
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.
The comic and television personality turns serious—semi-serious, anyway—in a combination memoir and self-help book.
Handler opens these generally short essays with a memory of childhood that closes with the exhortation to keep the child within us alive into adulthood: “Hold on to that child tightly, as if she were your own, because she is.” The memory soon veers into the comically absurd, with an account of a cocaine-fueled cross-country trip with a random companion who looked like another TV personality: “I don’t know if Dog the Bounty Hunter does copious amounts of cocaine, but he sure looks like he does.” Drugs and juice are seldom far from the proceedings, but therapy is close by, too, and clearly the latter has been of tremendous use, if “exhausting in the sense that every new development or idea led to a period of intense self-awareness followed by waves of acute self-consciousness coupled with endless self-recrimination.” As the anecdotes progress, that intense self-awareness becomes less fraught. Some of her life lessons are drawn from her experiences wrestling with the yips and setbacks of performing before audiences; some turn into knowing one-liners (“I knew if three men in a row told me not to do something, it was imperative that I do the opposite”). Most, even if tongue-in-cheek or rueful, are delivered with a disarming friendliness laced with her trademark archness: Her account of a dinner opposite Woody Allen and daughter/wife Soon-Yi is worth the price of admission alone. In the main, Handler is a cheerleader for everyone worthy of cheers, and especially women. As she writes, encouragingly, “You have misbehaved, and then corrected, and then misbehaved again, and then corrected some more”—and have grown and flourished.
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593596579
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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