A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing

Rating:
Summary: Price fan and cancer survivor
Review: I first read this in 1995, during the long week prior to surgery to remove a growing mass of cancer that, thankfully, has never revisited me. Aside from, once again, being awed by Price's magic with otherwise common words, it was especially comforting to read the very heart of a man whose prose I had read and long admired, someone who had survived a similar experience. Price is, hands down, my favorite writer.

Rating:
Summary: Honest, insightful, earthy
Review: I took a long time to read this book so that I could think about all that Mr. Price said, there was so much--about being a person struck down with a "catastrophic" illness, what it is like to lose the ability to walk or do anything else with your legs, about having cancer and wondering when it is coming back, navigating a large medical complex, about being a different person because of it all, about embracing that different person rather than resisting him, about what is most important about caregivers, doctors, nurses and friends. (Mr. Price has awesome friends who basically would go to the ends of the earth for him). I learned so much and found Mr Price's writing to be so honest and earthy and insightful. i hated coming to the final chapter. but loved what it had to say. i would recommend this book to everyone, it is a wonderful look at one's own humanity and that of others. Please also read "Letter to a Man in the Fire." after you have read "A whole new life." I read them the other way around, but it is more meaningful to read "a whole new life" first. Every member of every medical discipline should read this book--nurses, doctors, physical therapists, and students of all disciplines. As an oncologist, I learned a lot about how patients feel and what they might need.

Rating:
Summary: Honest, insightful, earthy
Review: I took a long time to read this book so that I could think about all that Mr. Price said, there was so much--about being a person struck down with a "catastrophic" illness, what it is like to lose the ability to walk or do anything else with your legs, about having cancer and wondering when it is coming back, navigating a large medical complex, about being a different person because of it all, about embracing that different person rather than resisting him, about what is most important about caregivers, doctors, nurses and friends. (Mr. Price has awesome friends who basically would go to the ends of the earth for him). I learned so much and found Mr Price's writing to be so honest and earthy and insightful. i hated coming to the final chapter. but loved what it had to say. i would recommend this book to everyone, it is a wonderful look at one's own humanity and that of others. Please also read "Letter to a Man in the Fire." after you have read "A whole new life." I read them the other way around, but it is more meaningful to read "a whole new life" first. Every member of every medical discipline should read this book--nurses, doctors, physical therapists, and students of all disciplines. As an oncologist, I learned a lot about how patients feel and what they might need.

Rating:
Summary: A great message for those with cancer
Review: I was sitting at the edge of a lake when I read A Whole New Life. I had finished by own book about the cancer experience and begun traveling to talk about the psychosocial (read emotional) issues of healing from such an experience. And then I read the words "the best thing the radiologist could have said to me was the old Reynolds Price is dead, who do you want to be now." It summarized for me much of my searching for what I had tried to say about what had happend tome. My old life is gone, was over the day they found the lump. I had forged a new one, but wish that someone along the way had told me that the cancer journey means becoming someone different -- and I think better. Thanks Reynolds Price. I recommend your book every time I speak.

Rating:
Summary: How one man surmounts near-fatal cancer and terrible pain
Review: If you are interested in how a man copes with the precipitate fall from health to paraplegia and near-death in a horifyingly short time, read this book. If you are interested in how a person copes with agonizing, intractable pain, which a wide variety of medical treatments are unable to affect, read this book -- and learn about how biofeedback, to his surprise, enabled him to continue to endure his pain but ignore it. An inspiring book that shows what an extraordinary human spirit is capable of enduring and overcoming, if it must.

Rating:
Summary: One test of a good book is...
Review: One test of a good book is this: does it change the way you live your life or how you look at people. Reynolds Price, professor of English at Duke University, explores in this work a theme that hits everyone but that we don't often consider, or wish to consider, that is, the effect of major trauma on one's life and the life of one's friends, and perhaps everyone else around you.

RP tells the story of his own experience with spinal cancer in a bold, unflinching, but intensely personal way. One of the themes of the work is how profoundly a patient is affected by the attitudes and communication habits of medical care professionals. While he has tremendous praise for those who showed loving concern for him in his difficult times, he also wonders why some were so callous. For instance, he was informed of his tumor by two doctors while lying on a gurney in a crowded hallway. "What would those tow splendidly trained men have lost if they'd waited to play their trump til I was back in the private room for which Blue Cross was paying our mutual employer, Duke [University], a sizable mint in my behalf?"

Also wonderful in this book are his lessons/recommendation for those who have undergone similar tragedies such as this: "Generous people - true practical saints, some of them boring as root canals - are waiting to give you everything on Earth but your main want, which is simply THE PERSON YOU USED TO BE."

For me at least, this book helped change how I look at people, and I hope, will give me strength to deal with the traumas that will undoubtedly come someday to me and those I love.

Rating:
Summary: big name, big cancer
Review: Sometimes when reviewing cancer survivor stories, I find myself with criticisms of the author's writing that I just suppress. The author may be someone with no literary pretensions in the first place, the book will be read for the cancer story primarily anyway, so what's the point? But it's hard to extend this policy to Reynolds Price, who has a long string of fiction, poetry and plays to his credit and a national reputation. So - even though it feels petty-minded to do so, I will nonetheless complain that the writing in A Whole New Life struck me as lame, overly polite and pseudo-poetic, at times like the performance of a novice in a creative writing course. And for the survivor genre, this example is uncharacteristically emotionally evasive. We hear numerous references to the hours of "pleasant copulation" the author has indulged in while living as a single man, but no partners or former partners appear (overtly at least) in the story; there is a fleeting reference to two daughters who live nearby, but they never show up to help the author in his crisis and apparently weren't asked to do so. What's going on here? But let's cut to the chase. Beneath the emotional disconnectedness, Price has an amazing story to tell. Felled at age 51 by a 10 inch long spinal tumor ("the eel"), Price had half the length of his spine irradiated and emerged a parapalegic with chronic pain that registered "12" on the pain scale. (The scale only goes to 10). He got through the nightmare psychologically on the strength of a compelling religious vision, and through the treatment and rehab ordeal with the support of a brother, family friends, some literary peers and kind former students. The Duke University Medical Center, where he was treated (1984-1986) gets some A pluses and some C minuses. Humane and determined neurosurgeon (Dr. Alan Friedman); fabulous nursing; but a stony-hearted radiation oncologist (a "Dr. Z") and deficient pain-management program. Even while still in treatment, Price plugged away on the book he had been writing when the crisis struck (Kate Vaiden). It went on to win a National Book Critics Circle Award. He then proceeded to write 13 more books, plus numerous essays, plays and poems. A whole new life. Will appeal to: Inspiration-seekers generally; curious literary folk as well.

Rating:
Summary: A Long and Happy Life
Review: Stricken with spinal cancer in 1984 at 51, novelist Reynolds Price lived to tell the tale, and what a tale it is. With not an ounce of self-pity, Price recounts his diagnosis, treatment, continuous battle with pain and his "whole new life" as someone who now uses a wheelchair with brutal honesty and humor. If you have ever doubted for an instant that we as individuals are ultimately left to put our lives back together after a traumatic illness, Price's story should put that myth to rest. He alone with the help of hypnosis learned how to deal with constant pain, a subject that many of his doctors ignored.

Mr. Price gives every indication that he has a new and happy life. He certainly has gotten on with it and continues to turn out books almost as rapidly as Joyce Carol Oates. It is fortunate that someone with the literary stature of Price chose to write down his experience. This book, along with Abraham Vergese's book about his experience as a doctor treating AIDS patients in East Tennessee in the early years of the epidemic-- MY OWN COUNTRY-- should be required reading for all med students. If reading these two books has no effect on them, they should get out of medicine and into computers.

A WHOLE NEW LIFE is truly an amazing book and as good as anything Price has ever written. It may be his best effort. I cannot recommend it too highly.