A Breast Cancer Alphabet
*Starred Review* Breast-cancer patients will fall in love with Sikka, executive producer of NPR’s Morning Edition and a funny, chatty, and honest storyteller. She opens with her own diagnosis in December 2010, on the very day she interviews President Obama in the Oval Office and during the week Elizabeth Edwards dies of the disease. Sikka organizes the rest of her book about “Cancerland” alphabetically. A is for “Anxiety”; G is for “Guilty”; S is for “Sex.” She succeeds in writing the kind of book she wanted: “A little pick-me-up that I could turn to—nothing too long or scientific or self-indulgent. .  . . A short book that wouldn’t tax my chemo-addled brain.” She bluntly calls a mastectomy “an amputation of the breast”; calls her plastic surgeon her “very own Michelangelo”; reveals that her fingernails turned a blackish purple during treatment; and humorously notes the silver lining to losing hair during chemo (“Leg hair? Well, no waxing for the duration of my treatment so not so bad. The same for underarm hair”). She comes across as a loving mom (to two daughters), wife (to a Georgetown history professor, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2000), and friend. Just what the doctor ordered. --Karen Springen