An inspirational but thin account of an athlete's tragic accident and the long road she traveled to reach a different kind...
An athlete's memoir about her ability to overcome personal tragedy and reinvent her life.
In 1986, Shepherd (On My Own Two Feet, 2007, etc.), a cross-country skier who was expected to represent her native Australia in the 1988 Olympics, was out on a bike ride with friends when a truck hit her. Her body was crushed: broken back and neck, five broken ribs, broken bones in her feet, contusions to her kidneys, hip and leg muscles torn from bones, extensive lacerations, and massive internal bleeding. Initially, her doctors weren't sure she'd survive. In lengthy detail, Shepherd shares how she spent the next six months in the hospital and in rehab, undergoing treatments and surgeries for her injuries, which left her with permanent disabilities that wiped out any chance of returning to elite athlete status. She tried returning to college but eventually found a new direction for her life in learning how to fly. She explains how she tackled the task of getting her pilot's license, using the same intensity of concentration and will she had used to train for competitive skiing events. From there, the memoir makes some rapid leaps in time as Shepherd chronicles her involvement with a fellow pilot; the births of her children; writing a book about her accident, which was made into a movie; becoming a TED talk speaker; and the dissolution of her marriage. The author places great emphasis on the first few years immediately following the accident that so drastically changed the trajectory of her life, but much of the material is similar to what she already chronicled in previous memoirs. Shepherd’s tenacity and determination are evident throughout the book, and her recovery is remarkable, but the narrative could have used more depth and introspection.
An inspirational but thin account of an athlete's tragic accident and the long road she traveled to reach a different kind of fulfilling life.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62203-710-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Sounds True
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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