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An exercise in uncertainty / : A Memoir of Illness and Hope
by Jonathan Gluck
"At age thirty-eight, Jonathan Gluck, a new father with a promising journalism career, was shocked to learn he had multiple myeloma, a rare, incurable blood cancer. He was told he had eighteen months to live. That was more than twenty years ago. Gluck isn't just something of a medical miracle. He's also part of a growing population. Thanks to revolutionary medical advances, many cancers and other serious illnesses are no longer death sentences, but chronic diseases people can often live with for years. While doctors continue to look for "magic-bullet" cures, they can now extend patients' lives by slowing the progression of their diseases one treatment at a time. The result is a strange, new no-man's land between being sick and being well where Gluck and millions of others reside. In An Exercise in Uncertainty, Gluck maps this previously uncharted territory. Among the many vexing side effects of chronic illness he explores is uncertainty-never knowing from one day to the next how one's illness might change them physically, emotionally, spiritually. When you have an incurable disease, how do you cope with knowing that even when you're in remission, it will eventually return? How do you live with the anxiety, the fear, the near-constant awareness of your mortality? For Gluck, one surprising answer is fly fishing. If you're looking for peace in your own sea of uncertainty, it might be something else. As Gluck will be the first to say, cancer has absolutely nothing good to offer, but almost dying has taught him valuable lessons about how to live"-- Provided by publisher
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The 10 : a memoir of family and the open road
by E. A. Hanks
"In her trusted loaded-up minivan 'Minnie,' E.A. Hanks follows the same route as a long-ago road trip with her mother in an attempt to better understand the complicated woman who gave her life. Along the way, as she follows her mother's diaries and her own recollections of the route, she begins to uncover secrets--some unexpectedly wonderful, and others darker and more violent than she ever imagined--that bring more questions than answers. From the quiet expanses of White Sands National Park to the bustling streets of New Orleans, and the Texas-Mexico border to the swamps of the Florida panhandle, she interacts with the amazing breadth and diversity of the people that call these places home. Reckoning with the past, the present, her memories, and herself, Hanks brings us along a beautiful voyage towards understanding how the stories we tell about the places we're from ultimately become the stories we tell about the people we are"
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My childhood in pieces : a stand-up comedy, a Skokie elegy
by Edward Hirsch
"From the award-winning poet, dark comic microbursts of prose deliver a whole childhood, at the hands of a not quite middle-class Jewish family whose hardboiled American brutality and wit were the forge of a poet's coming of age "My grandparents taught me to write my sins on paper and cast them into the water on the first day of the New Year. They didn't expect an entire book," Hirsh says in the "prologue" to this glorious festival of knife-sharp observations. In micro chapters-sometimes only a single scathing sentence long-with titles like "Call to Breakfast," "Pay Cash," "The Sorrow of Manly Sports," and "Aristotle on Lawrence Avenue," Eddie's gambling father, Ruby, son of an iron-smelter, schools him and his sister in blackjack; Eddie's mom bangs pots and pans to wake the kids (to a breakfast of cold cereal); Uncle Bob, in the collection business, can be heard threatening people on the upstairs phone; and nobody suffers fools or gives hugs. In this household, Eddie learned to jab with his left and hook with his right, never to kid a kidder, and how to sneak out at night. Steeped in rage and exuberance, Yiddishkeit and Midwestern practicality, Hirsch's laugh-and-cry performance animates a heartbreaking odyssey, from the cradle to the day he leaves home, armed with sorrow and a huge store of killing poetic wit"
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North to the future : an offline adventure through the changing wilds of Alaska
by Ben Weissenbach
"At the age of twenty-one, college student Ben Weissenbach set out into the Alaskan wilderness armed with little more than inspiration from his literary heroes and a growing interest in climate change. What meets him there is a landscape both stark and awe-inspiring-a part of the world seen by few outside a small contingent of scientists with big personalities. There's Roman Dial, the larger-than-life field scientist who leads him on a five week journey into the Alaskan backcountry. There's Kenji Yoshikawa, the isolated researcher who leaves Ben alone for eleven days to care for his remote cabin, where temperatures at night drop to -49 degrees Fahrenheit. And there's Matt Nolan, the independent glaciologist who flies planes onto glaciers. As Ben's mental and physical resilience is tested, he discovers far more than his own limits; struck by the landscape's staggering beauty and sheer indifference to humanity, Ben emerges from each experience with a new perspective on our modern relationships to technology-and a deep sense of wonder for our natural world"-- Provided by publisher
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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