NO SUCH THING AS A BAD DAY.

• Author: Fallows, James
• Position: Review

NO SUCH THING AS A BAD DAY by Hamilton Jordan Longstreet Press, $22.00

THIS MODEST BOOK IS LIKELY TO work with two different audiences. For the general public, it's the latest respectable entry in a field largely established by John Gunther, in 1949, with Death Be Not Proud, his elegiac book about his teen-aged son's battle with brain cancer. The phenomenally popular Tuesdays With Morrie is the best-known recent illustration of the genre. These are books in which the presence or possibility of death becomes the occasion for looking past the hurly-burly of daily ambition to lasting questions of family, generosity, courage, love, and purpose in life.

Hamilton Jordan, who in his early thirties was one of the two or three most influential figures in the Carter administration, had by age 50 suffered three different episodes of cancer. The first and most dire was lymphoma, diagnosed just after he turned 40; then skin cancer detected in early stages; then prostate cancer. Most of this book is the story of how Jordan learned about the diseases; the endless encounters with doctors and hospitals as he decided on experimental, high-risk treatment options; and the ways his condition made him think about his use of the years behind him and whatever years he had left.

Jordan intercuts his own pre-illness biography into this story, concentrating on two episodes: living through the civil-rights transformation of the early 1960s, when his eccentric uncle Clarence Jordan was running the multi-racial Koinonia cooperative in Georgia; and his experience as a rural development worker in Vietnam, in 1967. When wondering why he has been so sick so often, Jordan speculates that his frequent exposure to Agent Orange in his early twenties might have had some cumulative effect.

Jordan also mentions his earliest encounters with Jimmy Carter, when Carter was first deciding to run for the White House, but most of the book is about the process and consequences of the author's cancer treatments. In an unforced and convincing way, Jordan comes across as a big-hearted, brave figure who has thought seriously about his experiences and been improved by them...