The Cost of Hope: A Memoir

Review

“A memoir of a volatile but loving marriage [interwoven] with the tale of a daunting journey through the cancer-treatment system….[The Cost of Hope] illuminates the conundrum Americans face over the high cost of care.”
--Wall Street Journal
 
“The hot-button issue of unregulated health-care costs underscores this engaging memoir of marriage and terminal illness....A moving, beautifully written chronicle of true love and a clarion call for health-care reform.”
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“[An] affecting memoir….[Bennett’s] story of how to fight for any hope you can get when there seems to be none, provides touching and instructive wisdom for the millions affected by cancer.”
--Publishers Weekly

“[A] loving picture of a very human response to illness….Inspiring in some ways, it is also exhausting and frustrating to follow all the blind leads, to accompany Bennett on [her] quest....Even this reader’s mixed feelings are a testament to Bennett’s courage and honesty.”
--Philadelphia Inquirer
 
“With humor and compassion, Bennett provides a fascinating look at the American health care system.”
--All You
“Here is a book about marriage, love, and hope when there would seem to be no reason to hope. Amanda Bennett describes her lively, complex, never-dull life with her husband with a directness that is both understated and heartbreaking, and in the context of his illness and treatment she asks the unanswerable: What are the human and economic costs of providing medical treatment when the outcome is uncertain? Bennett writes beautifully about love and loss, and how they illuminate one another. Long after one reads it, The Cost of Hope stays in one’s heart and mind.”
—Kay Redfield Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind and Nothing Was the Same
 
“A beautiful, brave, funny, vexing, and tender love story—a fight against death to save a man who was larger than life . . . Hope turns out to be priceless, and enduring.”
—Dominique Browning, author of Slow Love
 
“No one who reads this book will ever forget it. It is the moving, funny, heartbreaking, sober, inspiring, important story of a man and a woman energized to their limits by their stormy high-pitched love for each other. Interwoven throughout is a brilliant piece of reporting about the costs and agonies of the American healthcare system. Amanda Bennett has created, in beautifully crafted prose, something truly exquisite—and unique.”
—Jim Lehrer
 
“In The Cost of Hope, Amanda Bennett powerfully combines her own funny, touching love story with an increasingly frantic dance with American healthcare, raising urgent questions all of us need answered about the delivery and cost of medical care in our country. This is an extraordinary, memorable look inside the life of a loving family facing a terrible diagnosis.”
—Judy Woodruff
 
“An enlightening and touching memoir, The Cost of Hope is at once a celebration of Amanda Bennett’s life with her husband before and during his battle with cancer and a clear-eyed look at end-of-life decision-making.”
—Melissa Fay Greene, author of No Biking in the House without a Helmet

About the Author

Amanda Bennett is an executive editor at Bloomberg News, directing special projects and investigations, and was the co-chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board. She formerly served as editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, editor of the Herald-Leader (Lexington, Kentucky), managing editor of The Oregonian (Portland, Oregon), and Atlanta bureau chief (among numerous other posts) at The Wall Street Journal. In 1997, Bennett shared the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting with her Journal colleagues, and in 2001 she led an Oregonian team to a Pulitzer for public service. Her previous books include In Memoriam (1997, with Terence B. Foley), The Man Who Stayed Behind (1993, with Sidney Rittenberg), and The Death of the Organization Man (1990).