by Stephanie Nielson ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 3, 2012
Strength found through faith helps a woman combat personal disaster—will appeal most to Christian readers.
Family, friends and faith support a woman through personal tragedy.
As a young stay-at-home mother, Nielson was living the rewarding life she had always dreamed about. She had a loving husband who worked hard to support her and their four healthy children, a nice home, compassionate friends and extended family, a strong Mormon faith and a successful blog read by people around the world. Life only promised to get better when her thoughts turned to the possibility of another child. Then tragedy struck when Nielson and her husband, Christian, were badly injured in a plane crash. The author suffered disfiguring burns over 80 percent of her body and was in a coma for four months. Her husband suffered a broken back and burns on 40 percent of his body. Nielson recounts the ensuing months of struggle to regain some semblance of her former life. Graphic details of the numerous surgeries, physical therapy and daily existence as a severely burned patient are interconnected with the emotional roller coaster Nielson rode throughout her months of recovery. Her yearning desires were to tend to her children, husband and home, but she battled depression as she watched her children pull away from her disfigured body. Ultimately, self-determination, the encouragement of Christian, empathetic relatives and total strangers and Nielson’s devout faith helped her reclaim many aspects of her former life.
Strength found through faith helps a woman combat personal disaster—will appeal most to Christian readers.Pub Date: April 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4013-4179-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Voice/Hyperion
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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