Though frankly evangelical, Davis’ book is still a refreshing read for those seeking the inspiration to follow the stirrings...
This moving debut memoir tells Davis’ story of moving to Uganda and founding Amazima ministries, a nonprofit organization dedicated to bettering the lives of underprivileged children.
As a teenager, the author found herself hungering for an out-of-the-box experience that would allow her to do “something incredible for God and others.” She researched opportunities at orphanages and discovered a Ugandan home for abandoned babies that needed volunteers. Over the Christmas holiday in 2006 and just six months before Davis graduated from high school, she “lost part of [her] heart to a place [she’d] never been before.” A pastor whom she met during the trip invited her to teach at a kindergarten he would soon be opening, and Davis accepted. While she knew she would be giving up what most young, upper-middle-class adults take for granted—a comfortable life, college and prospects for a good career—she didn’t yet realize how much her work would change her. Davis came to love the people and especially the children in her village as much (if not more than) the members of her own family. At 19, she adopted four homeless little girls; by the time she was 22, she had become mother to 10 more. Her personal sacrifices cut her to the bone but taught her that "to be real is to love and be loved until there's nothing left.” The profundity of this young author’s commitment to God and to going to “the hard places” is nothing short of remarkable.
Though frankly evangelical, Davis’ book is still a refreshing read for those seeking the inspiration to follow the stirrings of their own hearts.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-1206-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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