A heartbreaking yet triumphant story of faith, family and survival.
Debut author Tiir presents a heart-rending account of her family’s flight from war in Sudan to a new life in the United States.
Tiir’s pleasant childhood segued into a period of turmoil and danger as Sudan became engulfed in civil war. Her family decided to leave their village to try to find safety elsewhere. Life became a series of moves from refugee camp to refugee camp in Ethiopia, Kenya and back to Sudan, often just steps ahead of marauding government soldiers and rebels. During this journey, Tiir’s husband, brother and daughter died, but in the struggle to keep herself and her growing family alive, she had no time to grieve. She was often blessed to find a relative, stranger or some lucky break that allowed her to carry on while her faith was tried and tested, calcifying in the extreme hardship. They went without food for so long, her youngest children forgot how cake tasted; they went without water for so long, her children’s tongues swelled to the point that water couldn’t trickle down their throats. These dire, subhuman circumstances continued until Tiir was able to fill out paperwork that allowed her family to start a journey toward immigration to the U.S. Gaps in her story—particularly after the family arrives in the U.S.—sometimes make it hard to follow. Filling in those empty spaces would create a more complete, compelling portrait of their journey. Elsewhere, Dinka tribal customs need to be explained in greater detail to help readers understand why Tiir was constantly shifting her children to other people and, likewise, why other people were passing children to her for care. Tiir’s memoir ends on an optimistic note: She found a church and a career and, in Nebraska, is surrounded by generous people. Someday she’d like to return to Sudan, which one hopes has a better future ahead, too.
A heartbreaking yet triumphant story of faith, family and survival.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481943765
Page Count: 106
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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