Tag Archives: cancer
Halfway to Venus Review (The Independent)
At first sight, you could be forgiven for thinking that Halfway to Venus, a “one-armed journey”, was going to be a “poor me” book. But what makes it so different is that, despite having had her arm amputated due to cancer when she was 10, Sarah Anderson is at pains to tell us that she’s…
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Halfway to Venus Review (The Daily Mail)
Just before her tenth birthday, Sarah Anderson complained of a lump in her left arm. An hour later, she was sitting in the doctor’s surgery (a telltale sign that this was 1957 and not 2008). By the evening, her parents had been told by the doctor that their daughter was most probably suffering from a…
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Halfway to Venus Review (Disability Now)
A request for assistance cutting up food leads to a jaw-droppingly ignorant comment from an airhostess, “Do you mind being my baby?” Thus Sarah Anderson felt compelled to write about what it’s like to live with one arm, in a two-armed world. You could say Sarah isn’t the luckiest person in the world. Her left…
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Halfway to Venus (Guardian)
The unkindest cut Sarah Anderson’s poignant memoir Halfway to Venus describes life with one arm gone, says Andrew Barrow The author of this fascinating odyssey is better known as the founder of the Travel Bookshop, made famous in the film Notting Hill, than for losing an arm to cancer at the age of 10. Never…
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Halfway to Venus (The Spectator)
I must declare an interest at the outset. Thirty or so years ago I went out, or walked out (or whatever the phrase is), with the author, until, that is, the night when, for reasons I have never been able to establish, she hit me over the head with a stainless-steel electric kettle. You may…
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Halfway to Venus (Sunday Times)
In 1957, aged 10, Anderson’s childhood was abruptly brought to an end when she was diagnosed as having cancerous lumps in her arm. A prominent surgeon amputated the limb, a procedure that, Anderson later found out, may not have been necessary. Halfway to Venus tells of her struggle to accept the loss of part of…
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Halfway to Venus Review (Telegraph)
As a child, writer Sarah Anderson had her arm amputated. Her stiff-upper-lip family never spoke of the trauma – and nor did she. Denial came at a cost, she tells Cassandra Jardine Shortly before Sarah Anderson’s 10th birthday, the first lump was found just below the elbow of her left arm. For the next seven…
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