When Your Life Is Touched by Cancer: Practical Advice and Insights for Patients, Professionals, and Those Who Care

In this slim and useful volume, Riter, a cancer survivor and the executive director of the Cancer Resource Center of the Finger Lakes in Ithaca, N.Y., offers thoughtful advice for cancer patients, as well as their loved ones and medical support teams. Riter doesn’t discuss the specifics of cancer pathologies or treatments, but rather counsels readers on topics related to living with and making decisions about cancer. As much of this material first appeared as columns in the Ithaca Journal, there is a fair amount of repetition but, overall, this has the feeling of reinforcement rather than redundancy. Riter’s advice is, in many cases, refreshingly different. For example, in response to well-wishers’ exhortations to “be positive,” he admits: “I cringe whenever I hear those words.” In addition to suggestions regarding what to ask doctors and how cancer patients can talk to family members and vice versa, Riter covers some unusual material, such as donating blood and organs, and mental illness and cancer. These brief passages are of an appropriate length for stressed or fatigued cancer patients and those surrounding them. They convey the right mixture of hope and realism with the welcome addition of humor. (Nov.)