A simple, inspiring memoir.
An open water swimmer’s memoir about how she survived a traumatic year marred by heartbreak and a life-threatening health crisis.
Born covered in hair that made her look like “a little seal” and possessed of the remarkable ability to acclimatize easily to cold, often freezing water, Cox (Open Water Swimming Manual: An Expert's Survival Guide for Triathletes and Open Water Swimmers, 2013, etc.) seemed destined for the aquatic pursuits that defined her later life. As an adult, she successfully swam across the Bering Strait, the Beagle Channel, Disko Bay, and Lake Titicaca and became an unofficial goodwill ambassador between nations. Her metabolism was so efficient that she became the subject of numerous medical studies. But in 2012, Cox’s amazing body began to falter. First, her feet began to swell. Then she developed an irregular heartbeat and severe cramping in both hands. At first, she thought her symptoms were stress-induced. Her mother had passed away a year earlier, and for 25 years, she had cared for her parents. Doctors told her that her prognosis for recovery was poor and that if her body did not respond to medication, she would need a heart transplant. Unwilling to “have my heart cut out of my body,” Cox examined everything in her life, from her diet and personal habits to her friendships. She dispensed with all negative thinking and became more aware of “the things that were stressing me” so that she could handle them more appropriately. A few months later, her heart rate had become more normal and she was reacclimatizing her body to the cold by moving her hands and arms in a kitchen sink filled with ice water. Six months later, she had completely recovered. Not only was she able to swim again, but she also loved it more deeply than ever before. Told in straightforward language straight from the heart, Cox’s story is a celebration of mindful living and a reminder that few things are ever permanently out of reach.
A simple, inspiring memoir.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-94762-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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BOOK REVIEW
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