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Rewriting Illness
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Benedict
- Length: 6 hrs and 12 mins
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Rewriting Illness
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Publisher's summary
By turns somber and funny but above all provocative, Elizabeth Benedict’s Rewriting Illness: A View of My Own is a most unconventional memoir. With wisdom, self-effacing wit, and the storytelling skills of a seasoned novelist, she brings to life her cancer diagnosis and committed hypochondria. As she discovers multiplying lumps in her armpit, she describes her initial terror, interspersed with moments of self-mocking levity as she indulges in “natural remedies”, among them chanting Tibetan mantras, drinking shots of wheat grass, and finding medicinal properties in chocolate babka. She tracks the progression of her illness from muddled diagnosis to debilitating treatment as she gathers sustenance from her family and an assortment of urbane, ironic friends, including her fearless “cancer guru”.
In brief, explosive chapters with startling titles–“Was It the Krazy Glue?” and “Not Everything Scares the Shit out of Me”–Benedict investigates existential questions: Is there a cancer personality? Can trauma be passed on generationally? Can cancer be stripped of its warlike metaphors? How do doctors’ own fears influence their comments to patients? Is there a gendered response to illness? Why isn’t illness one of literature’s great subjects? And delving into her own history, she wonders if having had children would have changed her life as a writer and hypochondriac. Post diagnosis, Benedict asks, “Which fear is worse: the fear of knowing or the reality of knowing? (164)”
Throughout, Benedict’s humor, wisdom, and warmth jacket her fears, which are personal, political, and ultimately global, when the world is pitched into a pandemic. Amid weighty concerns and her all-consuming obsession with illness, her story is filled with suspense, secrets, and even the unexpected solace of silence.
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 35
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Story5 out of 5 stars 35
When their only child was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis (CF) at the age of two, Maryanne O'Hara and her husband were told that Caitlin could live a long life or be dead in a matter of months. Thirty-one years later, Caitlin lost her battle with this devastating disease following an excruciating two-year wait on the transplant list and a last-minute race to locate a pair of healthy lungs. The sudden spiral of events left Maryanne in an existential crisis, searching to find an answer to the eternal question: Why we are here?
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5 out of 5 stars
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Powerful Story of Tribulation and Love
- By Bob on 05-21-22
By: Maryanne O'Hara
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Committed
- Dispatches from a Psychiatrist in Training
- By: Adam Stern MD
- Narrated by: Adam Stern MD
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 78
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 69
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 69
Adam Stern was a student at a state medical school before being selected to train as a psychiatry resident at one of the most prestigious programs in the country. His new and initially intimidating classmates were high achievers from the Ivy League and other elite universities. Faculty raved about the group as though the residency program had won the lottery, nicknaming them “The Golden Class”, but would Stern ever prove that he belonged? In his memoir, Stern pulls back the curtain on the intense and emotionally challenging lessons he and his fellow doctors learned.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Thank you for reminding me,
- By Ms D on 12-29-21
By: Adam Stern MD
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Knocking on Heaven's Door
- The Path to a Better Way of Death
- By: Katy Butler
- Narrated by: Katy Butler
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 157
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 142
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 138
Like so many of us, award-winning writer Katy Butler always assumed her aging parents would experience healthy, active retirements before dying peacefully at home. Then her father suffered a stroke that left him incapable of easily finishing a sentence or showering without assistance. Her mother was thrust into full-time caregiving, and Katy became one of the 24 million Americans who help care for aging parents. In an effort to correct a minor and non - life threatening heart arrhythmia, doctors outfitted her father with a pacemaker.
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2 out of 5 stars
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A better way to narrate a book about death?
- By MAUREEN on 10-21-13
By: Katy Butler
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Changing the Way We Die
- Compassionate End-of-Life Care and the Hospice Movement
- By: Sheila Himmel, Fran Smith
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 72
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 62
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 62
There’s a quiet revolution happening in the way we die. More than 1.5 million Americans a year die in hospice care - nearly 44 percent of all deaths - and a vast industry has sprung up to meet the growing demand. Once viewed as a New Age indulgence, hospice is now a $14 billion business and one of the most successful segments in health care. Changing the Way We Die, by award-winning journalists Fran Smith and Sheila Himmel, is the first book to take a broad, penetrating look at the hospice landscape.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Sadly, not very engaging.
- By Debra S. Long on 06-16-18
By: Sheila Himmel, and others
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Smile
- The Story of a Face
- By: Sarah Ruhl
- Narrated by: Sarah Ruhl
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 109
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 96
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 96
With a play opening on Broadway, and every reason to smile, Sarah Ruhl has just survived a high-risk pregnancy when she discovers the left side of her face is completely paralyzed. She is assured that 90 percent of Bell’s palsy patients experience a full recovery—like Ruhl’s own mother. But Sarah is in the unlucky ten percent. And for a woman, wife, mother, and artist working in theater, the paralysis and the disconnect between the interior and exterior brings significant and specific challenges.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Synkinesis: I am there
- By Elizabeth Principi on 11-04-21
By: Sarah Ruhl
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When Breath Becomes Air
- By: Paul Kalanithi, Abraham Verghese - foreword
- Narrated by: Sunil Malhotra, Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 5 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 28,915
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 25,371
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 25,305
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Phenomenal book!
- By A. Potter on 01-16-16
By: Paul Kalanithi, and others
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The Undying
- Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care
- By: Anne Boyer
- Narrated by: Amy Finegan
- Length: 5 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 54
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 47
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Story4 out of 5 stars 47
A week after her 41st birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living paycheck to paycheck who had always been the caregiver, the catastrophic illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. The Undying explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, pro-pain "dolorists", and the many little murders of capitalism.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Provocative and moving
- By C. FREEMAN on 05-13-20
By: Anne Boyer
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Doctored
- The Disillusionment of an American Physician
- By: Sandeep Jauhar
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 10 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 78
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 66
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Story4 out of 5 stars 66
Hoping for the stability he needs to start a family, Sandeep Jauhar, an attending cardiologist, accepts a position at a massive teaching hospital on the outskirts of Queens. With a decade's worth of elite medical training behind him, he is eager to settle down and reap the rewards of countless sleepless nights. Instead, he is confronted with sobering truths. Doctors' morale is low and getting lower.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Frank, inside perspective on the follies of unintended consequences in medical reform
- By Jared T Wilsey on 02-25-18
By: Sandeep Jauhar
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Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them)
- A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying
- By: Sallie Tisdale
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 7 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 181
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 155
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 154
You get ready to die the way you get ready for a trip. Start by realizing you don't know the way. Listen to a few travel guides. Study the language, look at maps, gather equipment. Let yourself imagine what it will be like. Pack your bags. This book is one of those travel guides - a guide to preparing for your own death and the deaths of people close to you. The fact of death is hard to believe. Sallie Tisdale explores our fears and all the ways death and talking about death make us uncomfortable - but she also explores its intimacies and joys.
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5 out of 5 stars
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I thought I had more time...
- By Alyssa on 09-09-19
By: Sallie Tisdale
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Heartwood
- The Art of Living with the End in Mind
- By: Barbara Becker
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 4 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 45
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 38
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Story5 out of 5 stars 38
When her earliest childhood friend is diagnosed with a terminal illness, Becker sets off on a quest to immerse herself in what it means to be mortal. Can we live our lives more fully knowing some day we will die? With a keen eye toward that which makes life worth living, interfaith minister, mom, and perpetual seeker Barbara Becker recounts stories where life and death intersect in unexpected ways.
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4 out of 5 stars
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The author’s compassion
- By Amazon Customer on 04-16-24
By: Barbara Becker
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Finding Chika
- A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family
- By: Mitch Albom
- Narrated by: Mitch Albom
- Length: 4 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 1,992
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 1,727
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Story5 out of 5 stars 1,719
Chika Jeune was born three days before the devastating earthquake that decimated Haiti in 2010. She spent her infancy in a landscape of extreme poverty, and when her mother died giving birth to a baby brother, Chika was brought to The Have Faith Haiti Orphanage that Albom operates in Port Au Prince. With no children of their own, the 40-plus children who live, play, and go to school at the orphanage have become family to Mitch and his wife, Janine. But at age five, Chika is suddenly diagnosed with something a doctor there says "no one in Haiti can help you with."
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5 out of 5 stars
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BUY READ AND RECOMMEND THIS BOOK
- By Ann Grant on 11-05-19
By: Mitch Albom
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God's Hotel
- A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine
- By: Victoria Sweet
- Narrated by: Victoria Sweet
- Length: 13 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 356
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 312
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 313
San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Hôtel-Dieu (God's hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves - "anyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times" and needed extended medical care - ended up here. So did Victoria Sweet, who came for two months and stayed for 20 years. Laguna Honda, lower-tech but human-paced, gave Sweet the opportunity to practice a kind of attentive medicine that has almost vanished.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great read
- By kayla solomon on 04-08-17
By: Victoria Sweet
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Critical Care
- A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, and Everything in Between
- By: Theresa Brown
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 5 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 90
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 70
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 71
In her former career as an English professor, Theresa Brown had been shielded from the harsh reality of death. That all changed the day she decided to become an oncology nurse. In Critical Care, Theresa writes powerfully and honestly about her first year on the hospital floor. With great compassion and a disarming sense of humor, she shares the trials and triumphs of her patients and comes to realize that caring for a patient means much more than simply treating a disease.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent all the way around!
- By Susan on 10-12-17
By: Theresa Brown
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Laughing Through the Ugly Cry
- ...and Finding Unstoppable Joy
- By: Dawn Barton
- Narrated by: Dawn Barton
- Length: 3 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 66
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 55
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Story5 out of 5 stars 55
In this collection of honest and sometimes raw stories, Dawn throws a loving, untoned arm around listeners as she brings them along on her journey through the loss of a child, divorce, cancer, rape, the death of her only sibling, her husband's substance abuse, and finding her way back to Jesus in the middle of it all. Dawn shares her personal story to show listeners how to find happiness and purpose even in the darkest of days. A beautiful gift book, Laughing Through the Ugly Cry is a great reminder to your girlfriends that you are with them every step of the way.
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5 out of 5 stars
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What a testimony!
- By rlcott on 09-05-23
By: Dawn Barton
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Your Heart, My Hands
- An Immigrant's Remarkable Journey to Become One of America's Preeminent Cardiac Surgeons
- By: Arun K. Singh MD, John Hanc - contributor, Delos Cosgrove MD - foreword
- Narrated by: Shridhar Solanki
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 27
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 23
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Story5 out of 5 stars 23
Leaving a life marked by crippling setbacks and his father's doubt, in 1967 a 20-something doctor from India arrived in America with only five dollars and the desire to claim his American dream. Faced with an entirely new culture, racism, and the lasting effects of disabling childhood injuries, through hard work and perseverance he overcame all odds. Now having performed over 15,000 open-heart surgeries, more than nearly every surgeon in history, Dr. Singh reflects on his most memorable patients and his incredible personal life.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Remarkable!
- By Stacey on 12-01-22
By: Arun K. Singh MD, and others
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One Doctor
- Close Calls, Cold Cases, and the Mysteries of Medicine
- By: Brendan Reilly
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 15 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 2,217
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 2,016
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 2,012
An epic story told by a unique voice in American medicine, One Doctor describes life-changing experiences in the career of a distinguished physician. In riveting first-person prose, Dr. Brendan Reilly takes us to the front lines of medicine today.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Simply Brilliant
- By Jan on 06-20-14
By: Brendan Reilly
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Marrow
- A Love Story
- By: Elizabeth Lesser
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Lesser, Sally Field
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 227
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 208
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 208
A mesmerizing and courageous memoir: the story of two sisters uncovering the depth of their love through the life-and-death experience of a bone marrow transplant. Throughout her life Elizabeth Lesser has sought understanding about what it means to be true to yourself and, at the same time, truly connected to the ones you love. But when her sister, Maggie, needs a bone marrow transplant to save her life, and Lesser learns that she is the perfect match, she faces a far more immediate and complex question about what it really means to love.
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5 out of 5 stars
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“ Love came first “
- By marie on 03-26-18
By: Elizabeth Lesser
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Chicken Soup for the Soul: Think Positive
- 101 Inspirational Stories about Counting Your Blessings and Having a Positive Attitude
- By: Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Amy Newmark, and others
- Narrated by: Tanya Eby, Jim Bond
- Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 175
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 145
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Story4 out of 5 stars 148
101 True Stories about how Positive Thinking can change your life! Everyone needs a little attitude adjustment once in a while, and these amazing true life stories reveal how real people used positive thinking to improve their lives and overcome challenges. You’ll read stories about how you can make every day a special day, incorporate gratitude and joy into your daily life, count your blessings and change your outlook, use a few well-chosen words to reorient your life, manage cancer and other health challenges through a positive attitude, simplify and have a more meaningful life and more!
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great read!
- By AnAppleForEden on 02-12-13
By: Jack Canfield, and others
What listeners say about Rewriting Illness
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Amazon Customer
- 03-01-24
Wise, often humorous memoir of illness
I loved this funny, modest, probing account of a novelist's bout with cancer, from the moment she finds a lump in her armpit, to the end of medical treatment. Composed of short essayistic segments with wry titles (e.g. "What I Wanted to Say to the Doctor" "My Own Private Hypochondria" "I Got Sick and Then I Got Better"), it's also about her joyful second marriage, family, work, and response to Susan Sontag's "Illness as Metaphor." Despite the subject matter, it's never depressing or egocentric. Benedict comes across as someone with the wisdom and honesty you'd want in a friend.
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