Whole New Life:An Illness And A Healing [Hardcover]

Reynolds Price (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: CTRL BUR VOOR SCHIMM; Large Prnt edition (1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0816174784
• ISBN-13: 978-0816174782
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,515,666 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Reynolds Price was born in Macon, North Carolina in 1933. Educated at Duke University and, as a Rhodes Scholar, at Merton College, Oxford University, he has taught at Duke since 1958 and is now James B. Duke Professor of English.

His first short stories, and many later ones, are published in his Collected Stories. A Long and Happy Life was published in 1962 and won the William Faulkner Award for a best first novel. Kate Vaiden was published in 1986 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Good Priest's Son in 2005 was his fourteenth novel. Among his thirty-seven volumes are further collections of fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and translations. Price is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and his work has been translated into seventeen languages.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One test of a good book is..., September 25, 2001

By 

Paul D. Baxter (Mebane, NC United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing (Paperback)

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.

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great message for those with cancer, December 7, 1999

By 

Kathy LaTour (Dallas, Texas, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing (Paperback)

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.

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How one man surmounts near-fatal cancer and terrible pain, October 18, 1998

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing (Paperback)

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.