Society

Siddhartha Mukherjee: The Emperor of all Maladies; Paul Cox: Tales From the Cancer Ward; Geoff Goodfellow, Grace Goodfellow, and Randy Larcombe: Waltzing with Jack Dancer; and Dudley Bradshaw: Cancer Four Times Removed

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Author: Felicity Plunkett

by Felicity Plunkett •

February 2012, no. 338

Society

Siddhartha Mukherjee: The Emperor of all Maladies; Paul Cox: Tales From the Cancer Ward; Geoff Goodfellow, Grace Goodfellow, and Randy Larcombe: Waltzing with Jack Dancer; and Dudley Bradshaw: Cancer Four Times Removed

by Felicity Plunkett •

February 2012, no. 338

Three personal studies of the experience of cancer

Felicity Plunkett

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Fourth Estate, $35 pb, 571 pp, 9780007367481

Tales from the Cancer Ward
by Paul Cox
Transit Lounge, $29.95 pb, 208 pp, 9780980846232

Waltzing with Jack Dancer: a slow dance with cancer
by Geoff Goodfellow, Grace Goodfellow, and Randy Larcombe
Wakefield Press, $29.95 pb, 127 pp, 9781862549503

Cancer Four Times Removed
by Dudley Bradshaw
A&A Book Publishing, $24.99 pb, 104 pp, 9780980842432

In 2004 Carla Reed, a thirty-year-old kindergarten teacher, began to experience a cluster of mysterious symptoms. Bruises appeared and vanished ‘like stigmata’, and a numb headache and sudden exhaustion suggested that something was ‘terribly wrong’. Her pains were ghostly and mobile. When her doctors suggested migraines and prescribed aspirin, she demanded blood tests. She received a call to come back for more tests, and still recalls the urgency in the nurse’s voice. ‘Come now,’ Reed remembers her saying. ‘Come now.’

Felicity Plunkett

Felicity Plunkett is a poet and critic. Her latest work, A Kinder Sea, is published by UQP. Her first collection of poetry Vanishing Point (UQP, 2009) won the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Prize and was shortlisted for several other awards. She has a chapbook Seastrands (2011) in Vagabond Press’ Rare Objects series. Felicity was Poetry Editor for University of Queensland Press and edited Thirty Australian Poets (UQP, 2011). She has a PhD from the University of Sydney and her reviews and essays have been widely published in The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, Australian Book Review, Sydney Review of Books etc. Her essay ‘Sound Bridge’, a portrait of Indigenous Australian musician Dr G. Yunupingu, was first published in Australian Book Review and anthologised in Best Australian Essays 2015 (Black Inc, ed. Geordie Williamson).