Library Thing Early Reviewers Book Review: In the Body of the World by Eve Ensler

I just received this early reviewer book this afternoon, was home with a bad headache and read Ensler's book in a matter of a few hours. It cast light on my own family relations beyond all else this book does. Contrary to its subject matter, it is not a depressing book.

Relationships, communicating with one’s body, facing life and death, defining love in its many forms, giving to the earth and its people more than one takes away. This is, in summary, what Eve Ensler expresses in her book, ‘In the Body of the World’. Ensler talks about her experience, her relationship, with cancer and chemo with wry wit, and candor.

In exploring and courageously sharing her raw and life changing experience of surgeries, ports, chemo, and all their emotional and physical side effects, Ensler emboldens others to find their own way, but encourages us to be bold enough to feel, to love, to name, to cry, and to believe that others are there for us. Ensler carries us through with beautiful metaphors and honesty about the facing and fearing death. At one point, her mother, also ill, tells Eve that “I dreamed they are came to take our hearts. They didn’t want mine. They wanted yours the most”...The next morning they move my mother to the cardiac unit because her heart has now become the problem. It is where we do not live that the dying comes.”

sh 4/201