Seeing the Crab: A Memoir Before Dying

by Christina Middlebrook

Book Overview

Christina Middlebrook was not quite fifty when she was told that a lump in her breast was not only malignant, but had already metastasized, and she had a fifty-percent chance of surviving more than... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0465074936
• ISBN13: 9780465074938
• Release Date: April 1996
• Publisher: Basic Books
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 7.5"

Customer Reviews

Seeing the Crab: A Memoir of Dying

This is a wonderful and inspirational book. It follows the story of a woman with cancer. Its a very deep story. The author makes you ask yourself if you can end with cancer. Christina is a very strong and admirable woman. As soon as you read it you will not want to put it down.

Unbound Truth About Cancer

This was a terrific book. I am not sure what inspired me to purchase "Seeing the Crab", but it honestly changed my life. I have been thinking about switching careers and pursuing medicine, and this book helped confirm it. Middlebrook was brutally honest about all of her various accounts with cancer. It gave a wonderful insight of what therapy is like, how important it is to have a strong support group of family and freinds, and the battle of everyday life with cancer. In my family, I have had two grandfathers die of lung cancer, and a third grandfather is now suffering from the same disease. Although the area in which the cancer is located is different, the treatment is more or less the same, as is the pain they go through. This book gave me such a deeper understanding for what my grandfather has been experiencing, and the knowledge of what to say when we are together. I thank Middlebrook for her honesty, since it is helping me in my own family situtions. I highly reccomend this book to anyone who has cancer or knows someone who does. It will really change the way you think and treat those with this disease.

A must-read book for friends, relatives.

I read this book to better understand what my sister is going through and what she may face in the future. Anyone with a friend or relative with advanced breast cancer should read it. We try to "minimize" what is happening to them, and we tell them to keep a positive attitude, and we deny the reality of the seriousness of the disease, and the outcome. We tell them they look good, and try to give them false hope of surviving cancer. As the author pointed out, this makes them very angry, as though we are discounting what is happening to them. We need to be there for them and to listen. Just because they are in treatment for this dreaded disease, it doesn't mean they will survive it. The author knew she would likely not survive, and that her treatments, as horrific as they were, were just "buying her more time." This was a sad, but "real" story. Very powerfully written. I could not put it down.

Riveting book that lends insight. Fascinating metaphors.

A good book for one who seeks to understand what it's like for someone facing cancer and its often hellish treatments. Middlebrook takes you inside the experience, to the heart of what it feels like for the "experiencer." I've never been afforded such a searing, close-in view, even after going through my own father's death from cancer. I wish I'd had this book then. Sometimes there is no right thing to say, but your presence alone can speak volumes. Middlebrook is a courageous warrior. But more than that. She gives hope that should we ever face such a diagnosis, we, like her, would be able to reach deep and tap unknown reserves of strength to face it--what else can we humans do? This is an often bitter and angry book, but it's beautifully written, uncompromisingly honest, and manages to be inspirational after all.

Refreshing

Finally a book about living with cancer that doesn't have a saccharine, happy ending. Middlebrook writes for the large number of cancer patients who don't necessarily have great diagnoses, and who aren't well-served by the current body of literature that emphasizes good outcomes. As she writes about how other people have such a hard time even *talking* about cancer, how one's own expectations and aspirations fundamentally change, and how difficult it is, day after day, to simply cope and manage and survive with the burden of an enormous life crisis, one feels like putting the book down and exulting, "Here's someone like me!"