F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that "life was something you dominated if you were any good." Harry Crews noted in his book "A Childhood: The Biography of a Place" that "survival is triumph enough."

Author Paul Stoller's memoir of his cancer diagnosis and treatment wanders the vast middle ground between these two poles. And while you can't argue success in that he did get well from his lymphoma, as a reader I often wished he would "fish or cut bait" and for that reason I gave this meandering book three stars.

Stoller practiced and witnessed the powerful effects of sorcery to heal or to hurt while on an anthropology research mission in the African bush early in his career. It's a riveting story that Stoller has told before in some of his other books.

But that forceful and richly-detailed storytelling is incompatible with his modern-day story about the Western medicines used to diagnose and treat his illness. Stoller practices the beliefs of sorcery without embracing the practice. It casts a bad spell over his story since it seems ridiculous to separate beliefs from practice - something even the sorcerers told him. His conflicted character dominates this work.

Conflict may have been the center of Stoller's illness but it really shouldn't have been at the center of his triumphant recovery.

Cancer and sorcery would not seem words to be used in the same subtitle at all, yet yoga-practicing anthropologist and sorcerer Paul Stoller found himself in an unusual position when diagnosed with lymphoma, and used the lessons of West African life and health to beat his disease. Ironically, the Songhay sorcery he studied professionally led to a unique ability to handle cancer's special challenges, and his lessons are imparted in Stranger In The Village Of The Sick, a deft blending of autobiographical memoir and anthropological healing insight.