It was one of Terence Foley’s idiosyncracies that he stuffed every one of his homes with as many things as they could possibly hold. And the function of kidneys is to filter what is useable from what is not useable, again sending the waste products out of the body. The function of the colon, beyond removing water from waste material and recycling the water throughout the body, is to eliminate what we do not need. Seven years later, the cancer from which he died was a rare and aggressive form of kidney cancer. At the age of 60 his colon had to be removed because of ulcerative colitis. Foley, a cable-car conductor in San Francisco, a specialist in Far Eastern history and culture, a speaker of several languages, an adviser to foreign countries on marketing their commodities, a journalist on radio and at CNN, a professor, a tuba player in a Dixieland band, a pilot of both Cessnas and helicopters – as well as his wife’s biggest booster and a loving father who knows how to allay his children’s anxiety about a cross-country move (no spoilers here – see page 49).Īnyone who wonders, as I do, about the ancient adage “as above, so below as within, so without” will have much to wonder about in connection with the particular maladies that Terence Foley contracted. In these pages we come to know Amanda Bennett’s husband Terence B. In addition, to craft a narrative of his decline and death – to be able to face and relive that history – how many writers could do that? And finally to address the issue of finance and public policy, to explore for the benefit of all of us the chaos of making health-care choices in the inevitable state of imperfect knowledge, amidst wildly varying and untransparent fees, to bring to bear on top of a page-turning narrative this financially analytical eye – truly this achievement is one of a kind. Yet more so when the husband is extraordinarily idiosyncratic. All the more so if that individual happened to be one’s husband.

It would already have been a great deal if an author had succeeded in creating a compelling portrait of any individual.

But that is how I felt when I read The Cost of Hope by Amanda Bennett (Random House, 2012). () Very few books prompt my inward spirit to bow to the book’s author because her work represents such high achievement.

The cost of hope by amanda bennett