A favorable review by David Thomson of Donald Hall‘s The Best and the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon appears in the current issue of the New York Observer. The book, which chronicles poet Jane Kenyon’s death from leukemia ten years ago, is summarized as “a celebration of joy and pain.” Thomson writes, “I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that so fully describes the way illness can take all other air out of the room.” Although a difficult topic for the reviewer—he notes that “It’s not really decent to review a book like this, much less question the author on words or strategies”—Thomson concludes by imagining another, more material side of the story. How did Kenyon and Hall, two writers who lived solely from the income provided by their work, survive the expense of such a long and traumatic illness? It’s a topic, according to Thomson, that is “increasingly relevant to more and more lives. How did two freelancers pay for it all, and how did they have the patience to fill out all the forms?”