Novelist Reynolds Price's personal memoir

Novelist Reynolds Price's personal memoir A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing was written in 1994, ten years after he was told that he had cancer of the spinal cord and no hope of recovery. The book centers on the redemptive role of his illness, a condition that left him a paraplegic. The words of the title, "a whole new life," sums up the book's major theme. Losing his old way of life, Price opts to make a new life for himself. The book has several major issues and concerns.

The first point Price makes is that ignorance is good when you are faced with a life-threatening situation. Don't probe for news, he advises. Even when physicians believe your illness is fatal, it may not be so. Even doctors cannot know for sure what a patient's powers of recovery are. "My instinct to hunker o

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