The Reader was co-sponsored and co-conceived by CavanKerry and LaurelBooks partner, The Arnold P.Gold Foundation for Humanism in Medicine. Publisher Joan Cusack Handler and Gold Foundation President and CEO Sandra Gold observed that patients, while waiting to learn about their physical health, typically are provided only pop culture magazines--perhaps entertaining but without the solace and comfort that literature provides. The Waiting Room Reader was designed to address that need by bringing fine and accessible writing to "keep the patients company." Here are uplifting and inspiring poems...

In the past, the few memoirs about children battling cancer dealt mostly with death and grief. This passionate retelling by a survivor's mother is about the struggle to help shepherd her child out of illness, towards health and through survival.

Now that more children survive cancer, this passionate retelling by the survivor's mother is required reading; the struggle of helping move the child out of illness.