Living in Parentheses

“I am glad to have been permitted to learn to live with, ratherthan simply die from, cancer,” remarks Rose Rappaport in one passageof this lucid, unsentimental, and transcendent collection of essays onher sojourn with the illness that eventually took her life. “Mostly I amglad to measure my life, not in terms of what it once was or what Imight have wished it to be, but of how wonderful it is now.”It was a transformative experience for her that shed profound lighton the changeable meanings of work, love, friendship, and growth. Theessays she left will as surely alter anyone fortunate enough to read them.