Adam's Burden: An Explorer's Personal Odyssey Through Prostate Cancer

by Charles Neider

A three-time Antarctic explorer who nearly perished in a helicopter crash at 12,000 feet on Mt. Erebus, Charles Neider tackles cancer's inhospitable terrain with the same straightforward courage,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1568332394
• ISBN13: 9781568332390
• Release Date: August 2001
• Publisher: Madison Books
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Deserves to be more widely read

I found this an absorbing personal account of a thoughtful layman's encounter with prostate cancer. At age 78, with a PSA of 14 and a Gleason of 6, Neider choose treatment by external beam radiation. He describes this experience, which began in 1993, in absorbing daily detail. Neider is curious but not contentious. He questions his own doctors and technicians, and he listens to other patients. He patiently records not only his own thoughts but the shared details of others' encounters with cancer. Two years later his radiation oncologist pronounces him cured -- with a PSA of 3.4. The book closes on this hopeful note in 1995. Six years later the book is published and the author is dead (of cancer?). That's the book's weakness; it closes with the story well begun but only partly told.