A Mighty Heart: The Inside Story of the Al Qaeda and Kidnapping of Danny Pearl
Mariane Pearl with Sarah Crichton, 2003
Simon & Schuster
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780743262378
Summary
For five weeks the world waited for news about Danny Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped in Karachi, Pakistan.... And then came the broadcast of his shocking murder. The complete account of his abduction, the intense effort to rescue him, and the aftermath are told here—in astonishing detail, and with courage and insight—by his surviving wife, Mariane.
A Mighty Heart is the unforgettable story of two journalists who fell in love with their work—and with each other. Together, Mariane and Danny Pearl traveled across the globe, dedicated to journalism that increases the understanding of international politics and of ethnic and religious conflict. In the end, Danny was caught in the dangerous fissure where warring cultures, politics, and ideologies collide. A Mighty Heart is both a portrait of a partnership built on the ideals of love, truth, and justice and a critical look at the methods and structure of the Al Qaeda network. (From the publisher.)
The book was adapted into a 2007 film, starring Angelina Jolie./p>
Author Bio
• Birth—July 23, 1967
• Where—Clichy, Hauts-de-Seine, France
Mariane van Neyenhoff Pearl is a French freelance journalist and a reporter and columnist for Glamour magazine. She is the widow of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and murdered by terrorists in Pakistan in early 2002.
Pearl was born in Clichy, Hauts-de-Seine, France being of Dutch-Jewish, Afro-Latino-Cuban and Chinese Cuban ancestry and raised in Paris, Van Neyenhoff met Daniel Pearl while he was on assignment in Paris.
They married in August 1999, lived for a time in Mumbai, India where Daniel was the South Asia bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, and later traveled to Karachi, Pakistan to cover aspects of the war on terrorism. Their son Adam Daniel was born in Paris three months after his father died.
Pearl's memoir, A Mighty Heart, which deals with the events surrounding her husband's kidnapping and assassination, was adapted for the film A Mighty Heart. Co-produced by Brad Pitt, Andrew Eaton and Dede Gardner and directed by Michael Winterbottom, the film stars Angelina Jolie and Dan Futterman as Mariane and Daniel Pearl.
Mariane Pearl is a practicing Nichiren Buddhist and a member of Soka Gakkai International. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Deftly written with the help of Sarah Crichton, formerly an editor at Newsweek and publisher at Little, Brown, A Mighty Heart resists the obvious peril of falling into hackneyed sentimentality. Instead of playing the part of the helpless, hopeless weeping widow while "screaming inside," Mariane Pearl is both sharp-eyed and practical, and at some points even mordantly amusing.
Jane Mayer - Washington Post
Documentary film director and former French public radio and television journalist Pearl tenderly recounts the heartbreaking story behind the 2002 kidnapping and barbaric videotaped execution of her husband, Wall Street journalist Daniel Pearl, in this candid and inspirational audio recording. There's no mistaking the steel beneath Mariane's lilting French accent as she explains why she wrote this book—to defy her husband's killers-and how she distrusted Karachi, a decadent city where anti-American and anti-Semitic sentiments abound, from the start. Her telling of her husb—and's abduction and the frantic attempts to save him is dramatic and disturbing, but she tempers it with choice memories of her and Danny's first meeting, courtship, marriage and excitement over their impending baby. Details about the historical, social and political background of the Middle East help illuminate the area and its inhabitants, but ultimately, this is a loving, illuminating and movingly recounted tale of love and courage.
Publishers Weekly
Danny and Mariane Pearl felt that good reporting is essential to a person's understanding of the complicated relationship between regional politics and religions around the globe. They both knew and understood the risks in their line of work. Believing he was taking all the necessary precautions, Danny went to Karachi, Pakistan, as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal to investigate terrorist activity there. The Pearls believed in the ideals of truth, justice, and love; they thought they would be able to contribute to world peace and/or world understanding. When the news came of her husband's abduction, the author put her reporter's instincts and the network of connections she had accumulated during her time in South Asia to work in the hopes of finding and saving him. A global effort to locate him and his captors was also going on, but culture, politics, and language separated the American rescuers from the Islamic terrorists. Tragically, it was impossible to save Danny despite the many kind and brave people who helped Pearl in her search. For five weeks, the world watched and waited with her, then pregnant with the couple's first child. This is a complex and moving story, offering an intimate glimpse of a marriage built on idealism. Recommended for public libraries. —Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
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Devotion: A Memoir
Dani Shapiro, 2010
HarperCollins
245 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061628344
Summary
In her midforties and settled into the responsibilities and routines of adulthood, Dani Shapiro found herself with more questions than answers. Was this all life was—a hodgepodge of errands, dinner dates, e-mails, meetings, to-do lists? What did it all mean?
Having grown up in a deeply religious and traditional family, Shapiro had no personal sense of faith, despite repeated attempts to create a connection to something greater. Feeling as if she was plunging headlong into what Carl Jung termed "the afternoon of life," she wrestled with self-doubt and a searing disquietude that would awaken her in the middle of the night.
Set adrift by loss—her father's early death; the life-threatening illness of her infant son; her troubled relationship with her mother—she had become edgy and uncertain. At the heart of this anxiety, she realized, was a challenge: What did she believe? Spurred on by the big questions her young son began to raise, Shapiro embarked upon a surprisingly joyful quest to find meaning in a constantly changing world. The result is Devotion: a literary excavation to the core of a life.
In this spiritual detective story, Shapiro explores the varieties of experience she has pursued—from the rituals of her black hat Orthodox Jewish relatives to yoga shalas and meditation retreats. A reckoning of the choices she has made and the knowledge she has gained, Devotion is the story of a woman whose search for meaning ultimately leads her home. Her journey is at once poignant and funny, intensely personal—and completely universal. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—April 10, 1962
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education— B.A., M.F.A., Sarah Lawrence College
• Currently—Bethlehem, Connecticut
Dani Shapiro is the author of the memoirs Inheritance (2019) Hourglass (2017), Still Writing (2013), Devotion (2010), and Slow Motion (1998). She has also written severl novels including Black & White (2007) and Family History (2004).
Shapiro's short fiction, essays, and journalistic pieces have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Elle, Vogue, Oprah Magazine, New York Times Book Review, the op-ed pages of the New York Times, and many other publications.
She has taught in the writing programs at Columbia, NYU, the New School, and Wesleyan University; she is cofounder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. She lives with her family in Litchfield County, Connecticut.
In 1997 she married screenwriter Michael Maren. They have one child and live in Litchfield County (Bethlehem), Connecticut. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Shapiro is a thoughtful observer, and her writing is lovely. Some of her most vivid scenes are those in which she brings other people to life.
Juliet Wittman - Washington Post
Brave, compelling, unexpectedly witty.... Stunningly intimate journey.... Thanks to Shapiro’s excruciatingly honest self-examination and crystal clear, lyrical writing, the journey—as secular swami Steve Jobs once famously said—is indeed the reward. (4 out of 4 stars)
People
(Starred review.) Shapiro's newest memoir, a mid-life exploration of spirituality begins with her son's difficult questions-about God, mortality and the afterlife-and Shapiro's realization that her answers are lacking, long-avoided in favor of everyday concerns. Determined to find a more satisfying set of answers, author Shapiro (Slow Motion) seeks out the help of a yogi, a Buddhist and a rabbi, and comes away with, if not the answers to life and what comes after, an insightful and penetrating memoir that readers will instantly identify with. Shapiro's ambivalent relationship with her family, her Jewish heritage and her secularity are as universal as they are personal, and she exposes familiar but hard-to-discuss doubts to real effect: she's neither showboating nor seeking pat answers, but using honest self-reflection to provoke herself and her readers into taking stock of their own spiritual inventory. Absorbing, intimate, direct and profound, Shapiro's memoir is a satisfying journey that will touch fans and win her plenty of new ones.
Publishers Weekly
In the last few years, memoirs by women attempting to find answers to the big spiritual questions have become a genre all their own. The best of these books includes Eat, Pray, Love and much of Anne Lamott's nonfiction—and, make no mistake, Shapiro's Devotion ranks with the best. What makes such titles work is the authors' openness to a sampler approach to faith and a seeming lack of ego, which allows them to be simultaneously unflinchingly honest and self-deprecating. Shapiro, who has written both fiction and nonfiction, grew up in a Jewish household but drifted away from the faith after the death of her very devout father. During a crisis when her son almost died in infancy, Shapiro realized that she had internalized the idea of prayer but was unsure whether or not she was a believer. Age and time, paired with the questions of an inquisitive child and her own middle-of-the-night grapplings with anxiety, force the author to take a look at what spirituality means to her. Verdict: This work should appeal to readers who enjoy memoir, self-help, spirituality, and women's books. To reveal more would undermine the reader's pleasure of discovery. Highly recommended. —Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of Alabama, Florence
Library Journal
Approaching her mid-forties, novelist Shapiro... is pulled to understand and deepen her own personal sense of faith as a means to calm the uncertainty and chaos of everyday life.... [Her] journey is a deeply reflective one, and her struggles are as complex as they are insightful, philosophical, and universally human. —Leah Strauss
Booklist
A deeply self-reflective, slow-moving memoir about the longing for spirituality. At midlife, novelist Shapiro (Black & White, 2007, etc.) was anxious, sleepless and worried about nameless things, asking herself constantly, "Who was I, and what did I want for the second half of my life?" Having grown up in a religious Jewish household in New Jersey, the daughter of a kosher-keeping father and a spiteful, unbelieving mother, Shapiro found herself, by her mid 40s, still making peace with her deceased parents. Recently, the author, her husband and their young son, Jacob, moved from Brooklyn to a bucolic spot in Connecticut, enjoying the simple life, doing yoga and going on retreats-yet not unaware of sudden, inexplicable calamity, like the illness suffered by Jacob as a six-month-old baby. Although his infantile seizure disorder was resolved with medication, Shapiro felt plagued by the specter of mortality, or as she learned through her Buddhist practices, what the Buddha gleaned under the Bodhi tree: "the fragility of life, the truth of change." Befriending such well-known yoga teachers as Sylvia Boorstein and Stephen Cope, whose teachings grace this memoir, the author worked through her alienation from God. She found a neighborhood synagogue and started Jacob at Hebrew school, attended occasional services, donned her father's traditional garb for the Jewish Theological Seminary's first egalitarian service and found joy in visiting her aged aunt. In short, Shapiro recognized that the sacred can be found in the familiar and everyday. There is much pretty writing here, taking cues from the limpid prose of Annie Dillard and Thoreau, as well as a winning candor and self-scrutiny. Measured, protracted prose leads this affecting journey.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Devotion: A Memoir:
1. Briefly, and cogently, explain what Dani Shapiro is searching for? What is she afraid of? Does her quest resonate with you, do you identify with her? Do you think medications are called for?
2. Why does Shapiro feel so little connection to the Jewish Orthodox faith of her youth? What about you—have you continued to practice the faith in which you were brought up? Why or why not?
3. How did her parents shape, or at least affect, Shapiro's life, perhaps bringing her to the point where she is now? What was Dani's relationship to each parent? How have their deaths affected her? In what way is her struggle with her faith bound up with with her parents?
4. Talk about Shapiro's attitude toward ritual—the chants, prayers and observances. How does she define ritual and what role does she wish it to play in her life?
5. What is the difference between religion...faith...and spirituality? Can you have any one without the other two?
6. It is suggested in Devotion that while answers may not exist, asking the questions is important. Do you find that advice unhelpful, even a bit too pat? Or do you agree that asking questions is part of spiritual growth?
7. What does Shapiro's practice of Buddhist and Hindi rituals add to her life? Why does she turn to those faiths?
8. During her Master Level Energy Work with Sandra, Dani says she had "entered a place beyond belief." What does she mean by that remark? Has that ever happened to you?
9. What does Shapiro mean when she says that "there is value in simply standing there whether the sun is shining, or the wind whipping all around"?
10. In the course of this memoir, what does Shapiro learn or come to understand—how does she grow?
11. Pick out passages in the book that strike you as significant ...either personally, as they apply to your life, or generally, in a larger, metaphysical sense. Read them outloud and discuss why they are meaningful to you.
12. How much in this book did you find relates to you personally? How many times, if at all, did you go ah-ha! while reading? Do you feel a sense of connection with Dani Shapiro? Or do her experiences have little in common with your own beliefs and life?
13. Do you like the book's structure—it's short chapters that read almost like essays or meditations? Are there certain chapters you enjoyed reading most? What about the slow pace of the memoir...did you want it to move more quickly, or did you appreciate its slow, meditative quality?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Sightlines: A Poet's Diary
Janet Grace Riehl, 2006
iUniverse, Inc.
171 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780595374991
Summary
As the author of this book, I want to share some of the creative process behind writing Sightlines. The book evolved over a year, following a secluded retreat, in response to my sister's death in a car accident.
During this time, I came to a strong sense that the world is charged with meaning, and that is a poem. The only trick is to tease out the meaning. That is what I proceeded to do as I moved back and forth between my Midwest home to my Northern California home.
Putting together this poet's diary was a little like assembling a 1,000 piece puzzle. Mortality became keenly real to me as my parents and I aged together. The sorrow of life's fragility, and joy at its tenderness, form the sightlines of all five sections in this collection of 90 poems as I examine and share the people and places of my life.
Her more recent CD version features Janet's voice reading her poems and stories, with music provided by her 93-year-old father.
Author Author
Following a family tragedy, Janet Grace Riehl returned to her childhood home in the Midwest. There, through her craft, she discovered a new sense of connection reuniting her, and the reader, with life through her debut collection Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary.
Janet is an award-winning author, artist, performer, community mentor, and creative collaborator. Her poems, stories, and essays have been widely published in national literary magazines such as Harvard Review and the anthologies Stories to Live By: Wisdom to Help You Make the Most of Every Day and Hot Flashes 2.
Her life moves between the big city in St. Louis in the Central West End to the family home place on the bluffs above the Mississippi River in Southwestern Illinois where she collaborates on creative projects with her 92-year-old father. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Rich and vibrant, complete with vivid language that bursts, or sneaks, into your mind.
James BlueWolf (Author)
I had read Sightlines: A Poet's Diary and truth be told, I did not want to listen to the spoken version. I feared that my personal experience of the written poems, which had been profoundly moving, would be diminished. I need not have feared. Although listening was a different experience, it was as rich and meaningful as reading had been.
Marcelline M. Burns (Amazon Customer Review)
Janet examines selected pieces of her family’s lives, picking them up, turning them over, scrutinizing them like pieces in a giant jigsaw puzzle. She tells the story of each piece as a vignette…with a twist. Narrative is not Janet’s medium, but rather something she calls the story-poem.... Story-poems are spare, yet rich in sensory description and emotion. As you read, you become engrossed…a story unfolds. There is logic, if not always a chronology, to her story-poem progression.... With the Sightlines audiobook, Janet has given us more than a heartfelt family chronicle. She breaks barriers for the memoir genre that should get every memoirist thinking. The writer in me is inspired to create something unique for my family.
Kendra Bonnett - Women's Memoirs Review
The new audio book Sightlines: A Family Love Story in Poetry & Music by Janet Riehl is a compilation of very personal music and poetry that is not to be missed.
Riehl's audio book developed from her written text, Sightlines: A Poet's Diary, which was published in 2006. With the new release, Riehl adds the elements of down-home music and her own voice bringing life to the poems she created. The musical component features her father's singing and fiddle playing as he is joined by other musicians for recordings that took place in his living room. The fact that the music was not performed in a high-tech professional studio makes its inclusion even more appealing and appropriate.
The poems by Janet Riehl are divided into five groupings that are spread over four CDs. The first section is devoted to her sister Julia (also known as Skeeter), who was tragically killed in a car crash several years ago. The emotional images Riehl creates through her words examine Julia's work, her love of life, the moment of her death, and the longing of those she left behind. Riehl goes on to share equally captivating poetry about her father, her mother, and two places that have special meaning to her—the family home in Evergreen Heights and her later residence of Clear Lake in Northern California. In addition to the poems themselves, Riehl provides emotional commentary that fills in the missing pieces and develops a more complete memory for the listeners to enjoy. Her words are straightforward, beautifully crafted, and offer a wonderful piece of storytelling.
From beginning to end, the new audio book Sightlines: A Family Love Story in Poetry & Music is a delight....The audio segments have been expertly compiled and edited to create the comfortable atmosphere of someone's home while also displaying professional detail to recording quality and content progression. Each moment of the CDs is filled with warmth, humor, and a deep connection to those who have come before us. Sightlines is a must-have audio book for anyone who appreciates a good love story with the perfect musical accompaniment!
Sarah Moore - Writers in the Sky
This recorded version of Sightlines: A Poet's Diary (2006) expands on the original 90 poems by including brief clips of 40 songs played by her 93-year-old father and his Sunday Afternoon music group. The poems are further set in a wider context with her father's stories, and he reads the poems he wrote that open Sightlines, along with the lines of dialogue that appear in poems sprinkled throughout. In this unique offering, we glimpse the lives, past and present, of the poet and her family.
Together words and songs weave a magical tapestry of myriad threads, recounting family folklore in the warm timbres of Riehl's quiet-spoken voice, each story-poem set in the lively rhythms of fiddles, guitars and mandolins, music reminiscent of a bygone era. The sometimes slightly discordant notes of the violin merely add to the beauty of the tales told.
This series of poems and songs is a memoir. It is also a series of love poems, composed in memory and celebration of three people and two places Riehl loves. She traces the treasured reminiscences of a childhood shared with her two older siblings—her sister, Julia Ann, and her brother, Gary, tenderly watched over by loving parents. Her attentiveness to detail is evident in the images and words which reflect her considered awareness of who she is and where she comes from. Here is where Riehl composes the haunting and lyrical songs to her sister, tragically killed in an automobile accident, an experience so devastating that almost every succeeding poem is written in reference, either directly or obliquely, to it. The mother and father captured on her pages are our mothers and fathers, the love she expresses for them is the love we feel for our own.
One striking feature of Riehl's poetry is the unmistakeable sense of presence that the author brings to her subject matter. Pick any poem from the book, and almost immediately the reader comes face to face, as it were, with the poet. She recounts, sometimes in devastating and searingly honest detail, her mother's progressive dance towards death. She is not afraid to open herself to the suffering of returning and re-living the death of her sister, a tragedy that changed everything. Riehl is a woman who has seen a lot, more in fact than many of us would wish to encounter. Yet her presence assures us that we too can survive the unthinkable; that we can live to tell the tale. And what is more, that in telling our stories we become more of who we are destined to be.
If we can locate the bravery within ourselves that Riehl points us towards, then we too may become in time as compassionate, caring, understanding and yes, even forgiving, as she. For indeed is this not what the best memoirs do? They do not point the finger of blame, but rather paint a picture of a wholly believable individual, someone who might have been our sister or brother or mother or father.
In the end it is the universality of her subject matter that renders her poetry so accessible. We read her poems not just to peep through a window into her life, but to lift the veil a little on our own, so that we may perhaps learn something about ourselves and our loved ones, even while we swim in the subterranean waters of her words.
Edith O'Nuallain - Story Circle Book Reviews
Discussion Questions
(These questions are provided by LitLovers and the author. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution.)
1. Choose a poem that has resonance for you. Listen to Janet’s reading and the interlude music on the Sightlines audio book. Why does that particular poem carry personal meaning? Does listening to Janet’s reading clarify or deepen your response to the poem?
2. How do the 90 poems relate to the songs, banter, and stories in the interlude? Pick a track to listen to and discuss how each relates to each other. What does the music bring to your experience in reading/hearing the poetry.
2. Edith O'Nuallain, a reviewer (see above) mentions the poet's bravery in facing loss of loved ones. Where in these poems do you find words that convey emotional solidity, the poet's strength through adversity?
3. Does poetry have a special ability to convey emotions such as longing, suffering, sadness, quiet acceptance and joy? Are poems different from a novel's expressivity? If you think so, in what way?
4. Riehl calls the poems in Sightlines "story poems" which she defines as "combining highly compressed narrative, musing, and observation using poetic techniques such as alliteration, imagery, and metaphor." In the story poem, as in prose, the sentence rather than the line is the primary unit. Her aim is to condense the work while keeping it accessible. How well do you feel this form succeeds in telling her story?
5. Riehl views Sightlines as an extended narrative, each piece fitting into another like a puzzle. What is the overall narrative spanning the five sections in the book? Is there a narrative arc, as in a piece of prose such as a novel or a memoir?
6. Riehl writes of three people and two places she loves. What would be on your short list for people and places you love?
7. Riehl has identified several themes in Sightlines: power of place, time, family, home, memory, and impermanence (the fragility and change in life). What are some of the poems you’d include in each theme? Do you see other themes here? Is there an over-all message? As a reader do you need a message?
8. The author has kindly offered up a recipe for her father's scrapple, a traditional loaf made of cornmeal and pork. It would be fun to serve it at a meeting devoted to Sightlines.
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The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Siddhartha Mukherjee, 2010
Simon & Schuster
571 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781439170915
Summary
Winner, 2011 Pulitzer Prize
The Emperor of All Maladies is a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence.
Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished from—for more than five thousand years.
The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.” The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist.
From the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave may have cut off her diseased breast, to the nineteenth-century recipients of primitive radiation and chemotherapy to Mukherjee’s own leukemia patient, Carla, The Emperor of All Maladies is about the people who have soldiered through fiercely demanding regimens in order to survive—and to increase our understanding of this iconic disease.
Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1970
• Where—New Dehli, India
• Education—B.A., Stanford; Ph. D, Oxford; M.D., Harvard
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize
• Currently—teaches at Columbia Medical School in New York City, New York
Siddhartha Mukherjee (born 1970) is an Indian-born American doctor and non-fiction writer. He is the author of the Pulitizer Prize winner The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2010). In 2016 he published The Gene: An Intimate History.
Mukherjee was born in New Delhi, India. He went to school at St. Columba's School. He majored in biology at Stanford University, then won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University where he earned a Ph.D. in immunology. After graduation, he attended Harvard Medical School to train as an internist and won an oncology fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital.
He is currently serving as Assistant Professor of Medicine at Columbia University in New York City. He is also a staff cancer physician at Columbia University Medical Center.[3] He lives in New York and is married to the MacArthur award-winning artist Sarah Sze. They have two daughters.
HIs 2010 higly-regarded book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, details the evolution of diagnosis and treatment of human cancers from ancient Egypt to the latest developments in chemotherapy and targeted therapy. In addition to winning the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, it was listed in "The 10 Best Books of 2010" by the and the "Top 10 Nonfiction Books by Time magazine. In 2016 Mukherjee published The Gene: An Intimate History, which quickly reached the top of the New York Times Bestseller list. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
An informative, well-researched study....The Emperor of All Maladies is at its most honest in describing the push-pull dynamics of scientific progress.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Mukherjee has undertaken one of the most extraordinary stories in medicine: a history of cancer.... He frames it as a biography, "an attempt to enter the mind of this immortal illness, to understand its personality, to demystify its behavior." It is an epic story that he seems compelled to tell, the way a passionate young priest might attempt a biography of Satan.
Jonathan Weiner - New York Times
It’s time to welcome a new star in the constellation of great writer-doctors. With this fat, enthralling, juicy, scholarly, wonderfully written history of cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee vaults into that exalted company, inviting comparisons to...Lewis Thomas and...Stephen Jay Gould.
Washington Post
It’s hard to think of many books for a general audience that have rendered any area of modern science and technology with such intelligence, accessibility, and compassion. The Emperor of All Maladies is an extraordinary achievement.
The New Yorker
Mukherjee's debut book is a sweeping epic of obsession, brilliant researchers, dramatic new treatments, euphoric success and tragic failure, and the relentless battle by scientists and patients alike against an equally relentless, wily, and elusive enemy. From the first chemotherapy developed from textile dyes to the possibilities emerging from our understanding of cancer cells, Mukherjee shapes a massive amount of history into a coherent story with a roller-coaster trajectory: the discovery of a new treatment--surgery, radiation, chemotherapy--followed by the notion that if a little is good, more must be better, ending in disfiguring radical mastectomy and multidrug chemo so toxic the treatment ended up being almost worse than the disease. The first part of the book is driven by the obsession of Sidney Farber and philanthropist Mary Lasker to find a unitary cure for all cancers. (Farber developed the first successful chemotherapy for childhood leukemia.) The last and most exciting part is driven by the race of brilliant, maverick scientists to understand how cells become cancerous. Each new discovery was small, but as Mukherjee, a Columbia professor of medicine, writes, "Incremental advances can add up to transformative changes." Mukherjee's formidable intelligence and compassion produce a stunning account of the effort to disrobe the "emperor of maladies."
Publishers Weekly
(Audio version.) Taking a strictly Western approach to the study and treatment of cancer, clinical oncologist Mukherjee presents a comprehensive, fascinating, and informative view of the subject that is part historical treatise, part biography, part memoir, part case study, and part science textbook. Two-time Audie Award winner Stephen Hoye does a great job of conveying all of the nuances of the narrative, which can jump around at times and includes a large number of footnotes. This highly accessible and quality audio production will greatly satisfy audiences liking titles that similarly attempt to humanize otherwise clinical topics, such as Seth Mnookin's The Panic Virus, Mary Roach's Stiff, and Atul Gawande's Complications. —Nicole A. Cooke, Montclair State Univ. Lib., NJ
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Apparently researching, treating, and teaching about cancer isn’t enough of a challenge for Columbia University cancer specialist Mukherjee. He was also moved to write a biography of a disease whose name, for millennia, could not be uttered. The eminently readable result is a weighty tale of an enigma that has remained outside the grasp of both the people who endeavored to know it and those who would prefer never to have become acquainted with it. —Donna Chavez
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. Cancer is often described as a "modern" disease—yet its first description dates from 2500 B.C. In what sense, then, is cancer a disease of modern times? How does knowing its ancient history affect your notion of cancer?
2. Mukherjee frames the book around the story of his patient, Carla Reed, a teacher who is diagnosed with leukemia. What did you find interesting or important about Carla's experience? How do you think she shaped the author's life and thoughts?
3. Mukherjee writes how in the early 1950s The New York Times refused to print the word "cancer" (or "breast"). Compare this to how we view cancer today. Is there any difference in the way you discuss cancer as a political or news topic and how you discuss a cancer diagnosis among family and friends?
4. Looked at one way, Sidney Farber's early clinical trials with antifolates in 1947 and 1948 were a failure, with all of his young leukemia patients eventually dying of the disease. But with the results of these trials, Mukherjee writes, Farber "saw a door open—briefly, seductively" (p. 36). How so? Why do Farber's trials mark a turning point in the history of cancer research?
5. "The stories of my patients consumed me, and the decisions that I made haunted me," Mukherjee says about working in a cancer clinic (p. 5). But in the 1970s, during the height of aggressive combination chemotherapy trials, Mukherjee paints a different picture of doctor-patient interaction: "The language of suffering had parted, with the 'smiling oncologist' on one side and his patients on the other." How have the relationships between doctors and patients evolved along with cancer treatments? What could be done to restore some of the lapses in this relationship?
6. "'Li was accused of experimenting on people,' Freireich said. 'But of course all of us were experimenting… To not experiment would mean to follow the old rules—to do absolutely nothing.'" Review the case of Min Chiu Li (pp. 135-138), and explain Emil Freireich's quote. Do you think Li's actions were ethical? How can doctors and scientists draw the line between reckless, unproven treatment and necessary experimentation for drug development?
7. How did Mary Lasker borrow from the worlds of business, advertising and even the military to build a nationwide effort to combat cancer? How might Lasker's vision be invoked today to generate funding and national attention for breast or ovarian cancer?
8. So many of the scientific breakthroughs that impacted cancer research, such as Wilhelm RÖntgen's discovery of the X-Ray in 1895, occurred by accident. What other "chance" discoveries appear in the text?
9. Numerous advances in cancer research would have been impossible without patients willing to submit themselves to grueling experimental trials—experiences from which they did not benefit, but future cancer patients might. How would you counsel a friend or relative about submitting themselves to such experiments?
10. How is the early history of chemotherapy linked to the histories of colonialism, the Industrial Revolution, and World War Two?
11. Was the War on Cancer a failure? Why or why not?
12. How did the tobacco industry react to studies in the 1950s about the link between cigarettes and lung cancer? How did the industry's reaction differ to that of the general public? Do you think cigarette companies should be legally liable for cancer and other health problems likely caused by smoking?
13. The 1980 Canadian mammography trial (see pp. 298-300) was possibly flawed because technicians disproportionately steered women with suspected breast cancer to get mammograms, likely out of compassion. Put yourself in the technicians' shoes. Would you have allocated your friend to the mammogram group? If so, how can trials ever be randomized? Should a trial with a promising new drug be randomized—even if it means forcing some patients to be in the non-treatment group? What if a new treatment emerges for a deadly form of cancer? Should half the enrollees in the trial be forced to take sugar-pills to document the efficacy of the treatment?
14. On page 316, Mukherjee argues that "the trajectories of AIDS and cancer were destined to crisscross and intersect at many levels." Do you agree with Mukherjee's comparison? What did Susan Sontag mean when she said AIDS and cancer had both become "not just a biological disease but something much larger—a social and political category replete with its own punitive metaphors?"
15. Review the case of Nelene Fox (pp. 322-324), whose HMO, Health Net, refused in 1991 to pay for an expensive bone marrow transplant to treat her diagnosis of advances breast cancer, citing the procedure as "investigational." In your view, was it appropriate for Health Net to refuse reimbursement? Should patients pay for expensive experimental treatments out of their own pocket? What if these experimental treatments turn out not to extend survival—as with Fox's transplant?
16. The author says that he was motivated to write this book after a patient asked him, "What is cancer?" Mukherjee could not think of a book that would answer her question. So he wrote it. Does "knowing your enemy"—knowing cancer—bring some kind of comfort?
17. On page 459, Mukherjee writes, "As the fraction of those affected by cancer creeps inexorably in some nations from one in four to one in three to one in two, cancer, will indeed, be the normal—an inevitability." Mukherjee makes this assessment despite the approval of oncogene-targeting drugs like Herceptin, which have given new hope to cancer patients, as well as promising efforts to sequence the cancer genome. At the end of The Emperor of All Maladies, do you come away with optimism about science's efforts to combat cancer? Why or why not?
18. In the final chapter of the book, Mukherjee creates a fictional journey for Queen Atossa through time to demonstrate how cancer treatment has changed over the centuries. How might you have summarized this book? What image, or metaphor, emerges most powerfully at the end of this book?
19. Germaine Berne's story, which ends the book, is not superficially a story of hope, since she ultimately dies from relapsed cancer. Yet Mukherjee portrays her as a symbol of our war on cancer. In what sense does Germaine epitomize the battle against cancer? How is her story a story of hope?
20. Mukherjee calls this book a "biography." Can a "biography" be written of an illness? How might such a biography differ from the traditional biography of an individual? Are there other diseases that demand biographies, or is this project unique to cancer?
21. In what sense does history "repeat itself" in cancer research? In science, where new discoveries keep altering the landscape, what is the worth of reliving the past?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Say Her Name
Francisco Goldman, 2011
Grove/Atlantic
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802119810
Summary
In 2005, celebrated novelist Francisco Goldman married a beautiful young writer named Aura Estrada in a romantic Mexican hacienda. The month before their second anniversary, during a long-awaited holiday, Aura broke her neck while body surfing.
Francisco, blamed for Aura’s death by her family and blaming himself, wanted to die, too. Instead, he wrote Say Her Name, a novel chronicling his great love and unspeakable loss, tracking the stages of grief when pure love gives way to bottomless pain.
Suddenly a widower, Goldman collects everything he can about his wife, hungry to keep Aura alive with every memory. From her childhood and university days in Mexico City with her fiercely devoted mother to her studies at Columbia University, through their newlywed years in New York City and travels to Mexico and Europe—and always through the prism of her gifted writings—Goldman seeks her essence and grieves her loss. Humor leavens the pain as he lives through the madness of grief and creates a living portrait of a love as joyous as it is deep and profound.
Say Her Name is a love story, a bold inquiry into destiny and accountability, and a tribute to Aura, who she was and who she would've been. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio• Birth—1954
• Where—Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Education— Hobart College; University of Michigan;
New School for Social Research
• Awards—Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction; TR Fyvel
Freedom of Expression Book Award; Guggenheim Fellow-
ship
• Currently—lives in Mexico City, Mexico and New York
Francisco Goldman is an American novelist, journalist, and Allen K. Smith Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Trinity College. He is workshop director at Fundacion Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano (FNPI), the journalism school for Latin-America created by Gabriel García Márquez. Goldman is also known as Francisco Goldman Molina, "Frank" and "Paco".
Life
Goldman was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to a Guatemalan Catholic mother and Jewish-American father. He attended Hobart College, the University of Michigan and the New School for Social Research Seminar College, and studied translation at New York University. He has taught at Columbia University in the MFA program; Brooklyn College; the Institute of New Journalism (founded by Gabriel Garcia Marquez) in Cartagena, Colombia; Mendez Pelayo Summer Institute in Santander, Spain; the North American Institute in Barcelona, Spain. He has been a resident of UCross Foundation. Francisco Goldman was awarded the Mary Ellen von der Heyden fellowship for Fiction and was spring 2010 Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
Writing
His first novel, The Long Night of White Chickens (1992), won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and his second, The Ordinary Seaman (1997), was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
In November 2007, he acted as guest-fiction editor for Guernica Magazine. "The Ordinary Seaman" was named one of the 100 Best American Books of the Century by The Hungry Mind Review. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998 and of a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship in 2000-2001. His books have been translated and published in a total of eleven languages worldwide. In the 1980s, he covered the wars in Central America as a contributing editor to Harper's magazine.
Goldman's 2007 book The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? is a nonfiction account of the assassination of Guatemalan Catholic Bishop Juan José Gerardi Conedera, a crime perpetrated by the Guatemalan military. The book, an expansion on what began as an article in The New Yorker represents the culmination of years of journalistic investigation. It was a New York Times Notable Book, and a Best Book of the Year at Washington Post Book World, The Economist, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle and New York Daily News. While the book has been widely acclaimed, to some degree a predictable disinformation campaign of exactly the kind described in the book itself has been waged against it. A new afterword in the paperback edition, rebuts them. The book is the winner of the 2008 TR Fyvel Freedom of Expression Book Award from the Index on Censorship and of the 2008 Duke University-WOLA (Washington Office on Latin America) Human Rights Book Prize. It was shortlisted for the 2008 Golden Dagger Award in non-fiction and for the inaugural Warwick Prize for Writing.
In 2007 Goldman published his novel, The Divine Husband and, in 2011, Say Her Name, the account of his wife's accidental death.
Family
Goldman's wife, Aura Estrada, died in a bodysurfing accident in Mexico in 2007, which he documents in his 2011 memoir, Say Her Name. He has also established a prize in her honor, The Aura Estrada Prize, to be given every two years to a female writer, 35 or under, who writes in Spanish and lives in the USA or Mexico. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
[p]assionate and moving...[a] beautifully written account of Goldman's short marriage to Estrada...…while Goldman's gifts as a reporter are on full display...the truth that emerges in this book has less to do with the mystery of her death—which, at its core, is the mystery of all tragic deaths—than with the miracle of the astonishing, spirited, deeply original young woman Goldman so adored. "I always wished that I could know what it was like to be Aura," he writes. Goldman revives her through the only power left to him. So remarkable is this resurrection that at times I felt the book itself had a pulse.
Robin Romm - New York Times
Goldman's long cry of pain seems more like memoir than novel. The use of real names, the apparent cleaving to historical facts, the relentless attentiveness to detail and feeling—all suggest that tenebrous realm we've come to know through the eloquence of Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates. Regardless of form, Goldman shares their dark territory. As to what a writer should write about his private life, the answer is that writers have no private lives: We write what we know. Goldman here bears witness to his anguish, which is mighty.
Roxanna Robinson - Washington Post
To call Francisco Goldman’s book about the death of his young Mexican wife an elegy hardly represents it. Lament is closer, but insufficient. It is a chain of eruptions, a meteor shower; not just telling but bombarding us in a loss that glitters. With the power and fine temper of its writing, it is as much poem as prose…. Tense set pieces, respectively heartbreaking and chilling…generate the book’s propulsive drama. What they propel, though, is its most remarkable achievement: the incandescent portrait of a marriage of opposites.
Richard Eder - Boston Globe
Goldman has called on his formidable resources to tell the story of Aura’s life, their life together and his grief as a widower… Harrowing and often splendid reading….these pages manage to bring Aura Estrada back to life. She is unforgettable. Count me glad and grateful to know her name.
Karen R. Long - Cleveland Plain Dealer
Extraordinary.... The more deeply you have loved in your life, the more this book will wrench you.... In a voice that is alternately lush and naked, lyrical and sardonic, philosophical and wry...Say Her Name will transport you into the most primal joy in the human repertoire—the joy of loving…[It] pushes back against the tides of forgetting, and gives Aura a new body, a literary body, to inhabit—a body so vivid that by the end of the book we feel as though we ourselves have met and loved this woman.
Carolina de Robertis - San Francisco Chronicle
Goldman's (The Divine Husband) fifth book is a highly personal account of the author's life in the aftermath of his young wife's drowning. Goldman moves in time from meeting Aura in New York and her harrowing death on Mexico's Pacific Coast to the painful and solitary two years that followed in Brooklyn, marked in part by his mother-in-law's claim that he was responsible for Aura's death. His struggles to exonerate himself from his own conscience, and from his mother-in-law's legal threats, is electric and poignant, encapsulated in painful such moments as the author's discovery of "the indentations of Aura's scooping fingers like fossils" in the surface of her face scrub soon after her death. Goldman also includes fragments of Aura's fiction and her diary: "Played Atari like crazy, rearranged my Barbie house" recall her youth in Mexico City, and "We're on a plane, we've spent most of the day traveling, Paco asleep on my shoulder" illuminate the private moments of the couple's life. Goldman calls this book a novel and employs some novelistic techniques (composite characters, for instance), but the foundation is in truth: messy, ugly, and wildly complicated truth.
Publishers Weekly
With total candor, Goldman (The Divine Husband) describes his life with his wife, Aura Estrada, who died tragically in 2007. This is only a novel in that he changed names to protect some specific identities; otherwise the story is true. This is an authentic work of the heart and soul. He and Aura had a short married life, but one can tell they were happy. They were both gifted writers. He was significantly older; her mother was controlling, and her father absent. Aura was a bright light of ineffable humanity. Goldman describes Aura and his life with her in a gradual way that circles backward and forward in time from the present. He fills in the story bit by bit; the actual description of the accident coming last. Verdict: The feeling, the memorial incarnation that this book creates, is monumental. Essential for all libraries. This book about tragic death is a gift for the living. —Henry Bankhead, Los Gatos P.L., CA
Library Journal
A nonfiction novel of love and loss...and perhaps even a little redemption.... Appropriately, in this novel of death and dying, Goldman writes gorgeous, heartbreaking prose.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Say Her Name:
1. Goldman's book opens with the scene in which he and his wife stare through glass at exotic salamanders, the subject of Julio Cortazar's story "Axolotl." Two questions:
a) Why was Aura so desirous of seeing the salamanders?
b) Why might Goldman have begun his memoir with this scene? What symbolic significance does it have in this memoir?
2. Why does Goldman write this book? What is he attempting to understand—and what is he attempting to convey to readers? Does he succeed in either attempt?
3. Why does his mother-in-law blame Goldman? Is there any justification in her court case? Why does Goldman say, "If I were Juniata, I know I would have wanted to put me in prison, too. Though not for the reasons she and her brother gave." What are his reasons?
4. Goldman writes, "I always wished that I could know what it was like to be Aura." Do you think the power of writing—and the mystery of reading—has enabled the author to resurrect Aura? Has he brought her to life for you?
5. What kind of woman was Aura? Describe her qualities, including her eccentricities. Why, for instance, does she keep dresses in her closet that she won't wear?
6. How did Aura's upbringing—especially the pressures imposed on her by her mother—influence the type of woman she became?
7. In her diary, Aura recounts traveling to a beach her mother hever let her visit. Goldman writes that Aura “discovered a new way to be there." In what way was the beach transformative for Aura—how does it change her, or what insights does it open up for her? Have you ever experienced a similar transformation in a special place you found?
8. Talk about the love triangle between Aura, Juanita, and Francisco. Is it natural...or unnatural?
9. How does Goldman himself come across in this account? What does he mean when he calls himself a "man-boy"?
10. What attracts the two to one another? Is their attraction in spite of—or because of—their age difference?
11. Francisco Goldman refers to this work as a novel, yet it is a true account of his wife, her life, and death. So...what is this book: is it a novel or memoir? Can the author have it both ways?
12. If the living move beyond grief, is it a betrayal of the dead?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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