The Cost of Hope - Book Review

June 24th, 2012 The Cost of Hope: A Memoir by Amanda Bennett Published: June 5th 2012 Publisher: Random House Non Fiction, Memoir 240 pages I was hesitant to read this book just because of the subject matter, another story about someone dying of a terrible disease. There seems to be a huge tidal wave of these books lately and although most are written to be inspiring and hopeful, they can really wear on you. This book is also about this woman's experience with her husbands terminal cancer. Having lost my mother in law a few years ago to lung cancer I was afraid to bring up some very sad feelings. But what intrigued me about this particular book was the concept. Yes, it is about a wife and her experience dealing with her husband's illness but she took a new angle on it. She chose to review the experience and go back and talk to the doctors about the choices that they made and also about the cost, monetarally, physically and emotionally. I found this authors writing style very to the point. She doesn't spend time describing things, instead she gets right to the point page after page. Her sentences are short and crisp. I think that this comes from the fact that her background is as a newpaper editor. Her relationship with her husband was facinating too. This was no typical love story, This was two people who loved and respected each other working their way through building a life and a family together. I would have loved to have met Terence! I admired the way that Amanda obviously didn't want anyone to feel sorry for her or her family. She wanted to investigate and in her case, appreciate the world of doctors, medical care and health insurance. As we all know this is a red hot topic right now. When Amanda begins to review the bills, treatments, options, etc for cancer you as the reader quickly realize what a tangeld web it is. In some ways it seems ridiculous and can make you very angry. But this isn't an attack on the system, it is simply a revision of the choices made during a very difficult time when all you can do is listen to different opinions and options and then guess. And that is where hope comes in! No one will ever know if the choices made were ultimately right or wrong but Amanda is not juding herself or anyone else she is just writing about surviving and respecting her husbands decisions and the way he made them. Thank you Amanda for sharing this story and Terence with us (and respecting your children's privacy). I thorolughly enjoyed this book and finished it in just 2 days.