In 2011 writer and mother of two, Bronwyn Hope is diagnosed with early stage breast cancer. Encouraged by a friend, she begins an online blog in which she faithfully diarises the days that follow, graphically chronicling the details of even her darkest days as they happen. Her reflections are controlled yet raw and immediate, comprising a mix of honesty and humor that will have you by turns laughing out loud, or crying. Over an 18-month period, Bronwyn propels her readers on a journey that will deliver to her some of life’s greatest blows and most uplifting moments. Along the way she shares intimate accounts of her life, her family and friends, and the challenges, both common and uncommon, of a breast cancer survivor. The Breast is History is that rare book that will delight and move readers at the same time as demystifying the experience of millions of women with breast cancer.

In 2011 writer and mother of two, Bronwyn Hope is diagnosed with early stage breast cancer. Encouraged by a friend, she begins an online blog in which she faithfully diarises the days that follow, graphically chronicling the details of even her darkest days as they happen. Her reflections are controlled yet raw and immediate, comprising a mix of honesty and humor that will have you by turns laughing out loud, or crying. Over an 18-month period, Bronwyn propels her readers on a journey that will deliver to her some of life's greatest blows and most uplifting moments. Along the way she shares intimate accounts of her life, her family and friends, and the challenges, both common and uncommon, of a breast cancer survivor. 'The Breast is History' is that rare book that will delight and move readers at the same time as demystifying the experience of millions of women with breast cancer.

As the body politics of life writing in the United States change, illness and disability memoirs receive considerable attention. Although these narratives are framed by a lack of health, they abundantly present health and do so beyond its binary relationship to the pathological. This book departs from previous scholarship by bringing into focus the writers' representations of cure, recovery, and healing as well as their reluctance to bring closure to their narratives and align their stories with traditional notions of health. These memoirs thus partake in the construction of alternative narratives of illness and disability.

Addresses the emotional and psychological challenges of fighting breastancer, refutes popular assumptions about treatment and post-treatmentptions, and offers guidance for making health decisions.

"Cancer can kill: this fact makes it concrete. Still, it's a devious knave. Nearly every American will experience it up-close and all too personally, wondering why the billions of research dollars thrown at the word haven't exterminated it from the English language. Like a sapper diffusing a bomb, Jain unscrambles the emotional, bureaucratic, medical, and scientific tropes that create the thing we call cancer. Scientists debate even the most basic facts about the disease, while endlessly generated, disputed, population data produce the appearance of knowledge. Jain takes the vacuum at the center of cancer seriously and demonstrates the need to understand cancer as a set of relationships--economic, sentimental, medical, personal, ethical, institutional, statistical. Malignant analyzes the peculiar authority of the socio-sexual psychopathologies of body parts; the uneven effects of expertise and power; the potentially cancerous consequences of medical procedures such as IVF; the huge industrial investments that manifest themselves as bone-cold testing rooms; the legal mess of medical malpractice law; and the teeth-grittingly jovial efforts to smear makeup and wigs over the whole messy problem of bodies spiraling into pain and decay. Malignant examines the painful cognitive dissonances produced by the ways a culture that has relished dazzling success in every conceivable arena have twisted one of its staunchest failures into an economic triumph. The intractable foil to American achievement, cancer hands us -- on a silver platter and ready for Jain's incisively original dissection -- our sacrifice to the American Dream"--

Serious illness and mortality, those most universal, unavoidable, and frightening of human experiences, are the focus of this pioneering study which has been hailed as a telling and provocative commentary on our times. As modern medicine has become more scientific and dispassionate, a new literary genre has emerged: pathography, the personal narrative concerning illness, treatment, and sometimes death. Hawkins's sensitive reading of numerous pathographies highlights the assumptions, attitudes, and myths that people bring to the medical encounter. One factor emerges again and again in these case studies: the tendency in contemporary medical practice to focus primarily not on the needs of the individual who is sick but on the condition that we call disease. Pathography allows the individual person a voice-one that asserts the importance of the experiential side of illness, and thus restores the feeling, thinking, experiencing human being to the center of the medical enterprise. Recommended for medical practitioners, the clergy, caregivers, students of popular culture, and the general reader, Reconstructing Illness demonstrates that only when we hear both the doctor's and the patient's voice will we have a medicine that is truly human.

It is the anthropologist’s fate to always be between things: countries, languages, cultures, even realities. But rather than lament this, anthropologist Paul Stoller here celebrates the creative power of the between, showing how it can transform us, changing our conceptions of who we are, what we know, and how we live in the world. Beginning with his early days with the Peace Corps in Africa and culminating with a recent bout with cancer, The Power of the Between is an evocative account of the circuitous path Stoller’s life has taken, offering a fascinating depiction of how a career is shaped over decades of reading and research. Stoller imparts his accumulated wisdom not through grandiose pronouncements but by drawing on his gift for storytelling. Tales of his apprenticeship to a sorcerer in Niger, his studies with Claude Lévi-Strauss in Paris, and his friendships with West African street vendors in New York City accompany philosophical reflections on love, memory, power, courage, health, and illness. Graced with Stoller’s trademark humor and narrative elegance, The Power of the Between is both the story of a distinguished career and a profound meditation on coming to terms with the impermanence of all things.

Explores the experiences spectators have when they watch a film collectively in a cinema