Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 240 pages
• Published by: Zed Books January 15, 1989
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0862328233
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0862328238
• Book Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Weighs: 11.4 ounces

Product Review
"Staying Alive is a woman's book-inspiring, gripping, compassionate, unflinching. A family story, an exquisitely drawn portrait of a mother and daughter, and the story of a woman's courageous decision to free herself from a history of breast cancer. I could not put it down."-Carol Gilligan, author of The Birth of Pleasure"Compelling What keeps this from being mere medical melodrama is the author's warm, meticulous reconstruction of her relatives' lives, including her tangled relationship with her beloved mother. A tragic but ultimately hopeful story." -Kirkus Reviews "There are many fine stories here-about dying with dignity and with disability-and about the courage to sacrifice vanity in order to live without fear." -Publishers Weekly

Product Description
Janet Reibstein's mother and two aunts grew up in New Jersey amid a close-knit, extended Jewish family set apart only by a genetic propensity for breast cancer. Over fifty years, the disease claims Janet's two aunts, then her mother, then a cousin. Finally Janet must face the far-reaching decision of whether to undergo a preemptive mastectomy herself. A history of the disease in America as well as a story of sisters, mothers and daughters, and the men who love them, Staying Alive is ultimately a tale of extraordinary strength and of the power of love in survival.

Reader Reviews
The book may seem different from your perspective. However, it might be good to know what underlies the whole story in the book. From my point of view, the author's claim has nothing to do with political action but genuin intuition of humanity which can be said a sort of wisdom for our survival towards future. It encourages us to be aware that the ongoing value system under capitalism is not necessarily conforming to our actual feelings or experiences. If your suffering, fear and suppression seem related to the current social system, the book is worth reading because it helps you remember what gives you the sense of being alive, responsibility for and love towards the future of the world. Disillusioned of lots of tragedies happening to the world, we have started wondering which to call real, the inner sense of happiness or the material world. I dare say, it is not critique that can change the world but sharing of anyone's failure within us. Only such an idea of sharing can lead us to the inner and direct experience that the other half of the failure has always existed in us. This is the only way and chance for us to make a step towards future. In that sense, what the author considers as a problem is not the masculine principle but the imbalance in which the feminine principle is being suppressed. Driven much so far by the masculine principle, we -both women and men- have been so bound to fear caused by dualistic and mechanistic views on life that we could not pay much attention to the self-destructive aspect of our society. The author, Shiva, simply but strikingly argues that the feminine principle of EACH one of us to be recoverd if we really want to remember what the meaning of life is, namely the reason why we have come here to such a beautiful place called "the Earth".