A moving affirmation of the healing power of interpersonal connection.
In McCormick’s memoir, a found family connects cultures, overcomes language barriers, and crosses borders.
In the 1990s, the author and her husband, Michael, who live in the Seattle area, struggled with infertility and experienced multiple miscarriages. A mental health counselor, she also suffered from chemical sensitivity, which caused “physical, psychological, and emotional reactions to neurotoxic chemicals found in ordinary products considered to be safe.” In 1997, the McCormicks connected with Children of Chernobyl Northwest, an organization that brings kids to Seattle for summer vacations free from radiation exposure. Maria and Vika Petrova, 8-year-old fraternal twins from a town in Belarus to which residents from the Chernobyl radiation area were relocated, come to stay with the couple, beginning a lifetime connection. The girls return in 1998, 1999, and 2001; with the author and Michael, they play the card game Uno, have competitions to see who has the funniest laugh, and enjoy swimming, among other experiences. A prolonged separation after 2001 was difficult for the author: “Knowing we would always view the same moon provided me with the comfort of a touchstone I could never lose.” Six years later, she and Michael reconnected with the young women during a transformative trip to Ukraine and Belarus. They met Vika and Maria’s parents, Zoya and Ivan, and their beloved babushka (grandmother) in person. “My picture of motherhood—and myself—had been transformed when Zoya recognized me as the honorary mother and babushka of her daughters and grandchild,” writes McCormick. In 2014, Vika and Maria traveled to Seattle with Vika’s 2-year-old son and their niece. Over the course of this memoir, McCormick’s eloquent writing about the physical and emotional effects of her medical challenges is touching, and it is likely to resonate with many readers. Her account of the love between the families, her own hopes for the future, and her strong belief in the power of individual acts to bridge cultural divides is inspirational, as when she writes, “I’ve learned that relationships bound by the heart can survive grievous obstacles in a splintered world.”
A moving affirmation of the healing power of interpersonal connection.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781647426828
Page Count: 336
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The stormy career of a top Navy SEAL hotspur. Commander Marcinko, USN Ret., recently served time at Petersburg Federal Prison for conspiracy to defraud the Navy by overcharging for specialized equipment—the result, he says, of telling off too many admirals. It seems that his ornery and joyous aggression, nurtured by a Czech grandfather in a flinty Pennsylvania mining town, has brought him to grief in peace and to brilliance in war. Serving his first tour in Vietnam in 1966 as an enlisted SEAL expert in underwater demolition, Marcinko returned for a second tour as an officer leading a commando squad he had trained. Here, his accounts of riverine warfare—creeping underwater to Vietcong boats and slipping over their gunwales; raiding VC island strongholds in the South China Sea; steaming up to the Cambodian border to tempt the VC across and being overrun- -are galvanic, detailed, and told with a true craftsman's love. What did he think of the Vietcong? ``The bastards—they were good.'' His battle philosophy? ``...kill my enemy before he has a chance to kill me....Never did I give Charlie an even break.'' After the aborted desert rescue of US hostages in the Tehran embassy, Marcinko was ordered to create SEAL Team Six—a counterterrorist unit with worldwide maritime responsibilities. In 1983, the unit was deployed to Beirut to test the security of the US embassy there. Easily evading the embassy security detail, sleeping Lebanese guards, and the Marines, the SEALs planted enough fake bombs to level the building. When Marcinko spoke to ``a senior American official'' about the problem, the SEAL's blunt security advice was rejected, particularly in respect to car-bomb attacks. Ninety days later, 63 people in the embassy compound were killed by a suicide bomber driving a TNT-filled truck. Profane and asking no quarter: the real nitty-gritty, bloody and authentic. (Eight-page photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-70390-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
Great fun.
The second installment of childhood recollections (after Opposite the Cross Keys, 1988) by mystery writer S.T. Haymon, who here evokes a sheltered 12-year-old's further encounters with life's earthier side.
Haymon's 1920's, upper-middle-class childhood revolved typically around school, home, loyal servants, and a pair of doting, well-educated parents—until age 12, when her father died and her mother decided to move to London. Refusing to accompany her, the precocious, comically self-confident Sylvia tried to limit this series of upheavals by insisting on remaining in Norfolk in the care of a favorite teacher—except that at the last minute her headmistress (already a sworn enemy) switched houses, arranging for two maiden schoolteachers to put Sylvia up in their house instead. Sylvia knew that the Misses Gosse and Locke were eccentric. What she didn't know was that the skinny, aggressive history teacher and the teary, puppy-like math professor were lesbians. Nor did she notice as Miss Locke's increasingly desperate infatuation with her began to lead the entire household toward destruction. Amusing characters abound—the gardener, Sylvia's only ally, whose faith in the value of a virgin's tips on the horse races led him to pay her for advice; the dour housekeeper who sang opera and downed bottles of gin; the art teacher's model who bewildered Sylvia with talk of "randy old dykes"; and the spiritual channel who informed her that her daddy was watching everything she did from heaven. Haymon's depiction of herself as an unusually clever, frequently petulant, and thoroughly practical young girl obsessed with filling her stomach while all sorts of passionate fireworks exploded around her evokes an era when secrets still existed and scandals were bursting to happen—and makes for slyly humorous, very British entertainment.
Great fun.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 1990
ISBN: 312-04986-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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