In their case, it meant uncovering who made the expensive decisions and why and whether the couple could have been less clueless as to how to fight the disease. The goal was to use their experience as a window into why health care in America is so costly. She uses the documents as a map, leading her across the country to revisit the doctors who treated Terrence, as well as to specialists who weighed in behind the scenes unbeknownst to the couple. The book’s central narrative begins several years after Terrence’s death in 2007 when Amanda embarks on a project as a top editor at Bloomberg News to reconstruct her husband’s treatment from diagnosis until his death by gathering and sifting through thousands of pages of his medical records. The book is an impressive feat and a darn good read, reflecting the skills Amanda acquired during decades of reporting and editing, as well as her biting wit, knack for the just right anecdote, and pitch perfect ear for the incisive quote. Along the way, Amanda dishes one of the most illuminating and digestible accounts I’ve read of why the U.S health care system is an unfathomable mess.
In her latest book, The Cost of Hope: The Story of a Marriage, a Family, and the Quest for Life (Random House), Amanda carries off a high-wire act worthy of a novel, as she weaves together a hilarious retelling of the couple’s courtship in claustrophobic, pre-boom China and their cross-country lives together in the U.S., as they build a family and she builds a career, with a heart-tugging tale of their nine-year battle with Terrence’s cancer.
Little did I know that her most enduring adventure there was her raucous romance with her late husband, the exceedingly eccentric polymath Terrence Foley. I first met Amanda Bennett in 1983 when she joined the New York bureau of the Wall Street Journal after her several-year posting for the paper in Peking (it was still Peking then).
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