Breathing for a Living: A Memoir
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Book Overview
A moving account by an extraordinary young woman who mounts a daily struggle with cystic fibrosis in an effort to lead an ordinary life. Twenty-one-year-old Laura Rothenberg has always tried to live a normal life--even with lungs that betray her, and a sober awareness that she may not live to see her next birthday. Like most people born with cystic fibrosis, the chronic disease that affects lungs and other organs, Rothenberg struggles to come to grips with a life that has already been compromised in many ways. Sometimes healthy and able to go to school, other times hospitalized for months on end, Rothenberg finds solace in keeping a diary. In her writing, she can be open, honest, and irreverent, like the young person she is. Yet mixed in with this voice is an incredible maturity about her mortality. The memoir opens with Rothenberg's decision to accept a lung transplant. From the waiting--and all it implies to the surgery, recovery, and her new life, Rothenberg muses on mortality in journal entries and poetry. Through it all, she reveals a will and temperament that is strong and wise despite her years. Laura Rothenberg's story, recorded and shared on NPR's Radio Diaries, was awarded the prestigious Third Coast Audio Festival Award, it also received an unprecedented listener response and generated more e-mail than any other story the producers could recall. Rothenberg's story was also featured in the New York Times and U.S. News & World Report.
Format:Hardcover
Language:English
ISBN:1401300596
ISBN13:9781401300593
Release Date:July 2003
Publisher:Hyperion Books
Length:254 Pages
Weight:0.81 lbs.
Dimensions:0.8" x 5.8" x 8.6"
Age Range:18 to 17 years
Grade Range:Postsecondary to Grade 12
Customer Reviews
5 ratings
Buy a second copy for a friend
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 21 years ago
The value of this book is that it isn't just about a brilliant young child, who becomes a brilliant woman, and ageless soul, with cystic fibrosis, but that its a book about making the most of each new day we are given. It is also a must read for anyone who is or has a loved one with a chronic or terminal illness, because the young woman offers up such priceless information of how to deal with friends, family and those in the medical profession. This is really important, and one reason we have bought copies of the book for the local Hospice, local public library and the local juvenile diabetes, and local cancer support groups we belong to. I encourage you to buy an extra copy, and donate it to your local library, hospice, health care support group, or personal physician. Read it even if you do not have a family member or friend who is dealing with a medical challenge, because I guarantee the insight the young author offers will become valuable to you at sometime in your life. She teaches great lessons in how to listen better. How to have empathy. How to not give up. And how to milk every drop of life from each new day. And how to avoid pity parties. In essence she teaches the reader how to live.
Loving Girl
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 21 years ago
Being one of the nurses who cared for Laura at Hasbro Childrens Hospital, one cannot help but to become emotional while reading this story. It brings back visions and memories of a young woman who brought so much light to our lives. She made me look foward to going to work and seeing her beautiful smile. She also made me appreciate life much more than I had prior. Laura is always in our hearts here at Hasbro.
God...
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 21 years ago
Take a deep breath before you read this slim little volume - and then try to imagine you can't do it, can't draw in enough air to feel like you've accomplished anything. That's life for Laura Rothenberg, who, we readers know at the outset, died at age 22 of cystic fibrosis before seeing her memoir published. Strung together from a series of essays, diary notes, and emails she kept during her adolescence and very brief young adulthood, Breathing for a Living is a devastating portrayal of what life is like for a very young and very terminally ill person. It's raw, beautiful, bittersweet, honest - and as the most joyful section (a lung transplant becomes available) quickly becomes the saddest as complications and tissue rejection set it, the writing becomes more illuminating and lustrous.Superb. Would that Laura had lived on to write again.
courageous and inspirational
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 21 years ago
laura was supposed to be in my year at brown, and although i didn't know her, i knew her face as i did many of the other kids at brown (being that we're about 5500 students). i was in one of her classes - the one that her grandmother refers to - and i clearly remember her coughing, the comments on the daily jolt, laura's op-ed piece and the professor's remarks the next class. i remember being so disappointed and angry that the professor actually had to get up in front of our 500 student class and tell us to be respectful of one another. when i listened to laura's piece on npr, i felt chills throughout my body. this was someone i barely knew, but i could feel her strength and energy shining through. reading her memoirs gave me a feeling that i can't explain - i knew some of her close friends at brown and travelling back and forth between home, school, and multiple hospitals while remaining strong for others is such an admirable quality that many of us can't even imagine having. laura is such a unique person with very strong qualities that i find truly amazing. although her memoirs can be saddening, they're a reminder of how lucky we are and how trivial some of the things we complain about really are.
Heroes Amongst Us
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 21 years ago
I first heard Laura Rothenbeg's story on NPR- as a student at Brown she recorded her daily life with Cystic Fibrosis- waking up each day trying to breathe- multiple treatments each day to rid her lungs of the thick mucus that clogged her airways. A typical story of this chronic terminal disease, but told in private, personal terms. Laura was a model for other studnets her age- she so wanted to live and to love. She went through a bilateral lung transplant but suffered from chronic then acute rejection. She was able to find romantic love with Brian and friendship with her many friends. Whomever Laura knew she touched their lives, and many of these people remember her in their stories in this book. Tragically Laura died at age 22- she was ready to die when the time came, and she helped prepare her loved ones for this loss. People with Cystic Fibrosis are my heroes- they live each day trying to breathe-every day of their lives.
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