It took me 2 1/2 months, but I finally made it through The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee. My primary care provider and I fell into a conversation about cancer and he said this was a very interesting book. Yes, it certainly was. Going all the way back to an Egyptian papyrus from about 2500 B.C., and working his way up to 2010, when the book was published, the author explores the history of cancer. It's an often-disturbing trip through time, describing the misunderstandings of long ago, and the sometimes-barbaric attempts to treat or cure the disease.
It was intriguing to learn how the "War on Cancer" began in the '50s, and how optimistic early "soldiers" were about finding a universal cure. Unfortunately, cancer is not just a single disease, so there isn't just a single treatment, and rarely is there a cure. Just a remission.
The farther I got into the book, and the closer to the present the information was situated, the more technical the vocabulary became, and the more challenging it was to keep reading. But I was determined to make it through to the end, and I did.
Although I feel as if I learned quite a bit from the book, I don't think I could repeat it to anybody in a way that makes sense. It was a great deal of information in one huge dose, almost like reading a textbook, but easier to read. If you are interested in the progress of cancer research and how it all got started, you should be able to find this book at your local library; that's where I got it.
After wading through that weight tome, I turned to a Young Readers Edition of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer. I sailed through that book in one day. It's an inspiring story of a young boy from Malawi whose interest in electricity, mechanics and inventions lead him to building a windmill to generate electricity for his family home. He was a teen at the time, with limited education, but access to a small library and a field full of scrapped machinery. He was driven by the desire to make life better for his family and his people.
Since William is about the age of one of my children, it was easy for me to see the stark contrast between the life he lead as a child, compared to the life of my own children. For example, I can't imagine going through a famine like he did, along with everyone in that entire area. They had so little, and many died, but many survived and forged ahead. William's imagination and ingenuity are amazing and inspiring, and they eventually lead him to a college education and the founding of a nonprofit group called Moving Windmills Project. I wish every junior high student would read this book and realize how much potential each person has.
Today I read Garbage Bag Girl by Celeste L. Edmunds with Richard Paul Evans. It's a short autobiography, and I read it in less than two hours. It was not pleasant reading. Celeste's parents were addicts, so she "mothered" her younger siblings from an early age. She was sexually abused by her parents' "friends," and later by teen boys in one of the institutions where she lived for a time. In and out of foster homes, she was happy when she found out she was going to be adopted. Unfortunately, her younger siblings went to a different family, and the people who adopted Celeste really didn't want her.
After many years of sexual, physical, and psychological abuse, Celeste was finally taken in by the family of a school friend, and her life gradually improved. Today she is the director of The Christmas Box International, an organization that provides shelter and care for abused, trafficked, and neglected children.
This book isn't a happy read, but I'm glad I read it. My life has been so very different from Celeste's; it doesn't hurt to be reminded that so many people have it so much harder.
Yeehaw! That's some mighty fine perseverance tackling through them books!
You kin bet yer bacon and beans it took some effort.
Ride on, partner! Every step counts on this trail of progress. Keep pushin' forward, one hoof at a time. Yeehaw!
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