While her stories are moving and the scenery is as beautifully caught as with a camera, Sovich reaches for spiritual life...
Journalist Sovich’s first book details her travels to Africa in search of adventure.
The author’s story—though not the book—begins with her childhood with a mother who traveled, Sovich believed, to escape her suburban Connecticut life. When the author found herself living in Paris with her husband, working a hated job and uncomfortable with her role, she decided to follow in her mother’s footsteps. Instead of a short getaway, her trip to Africa was a desperate attempt to reconnect to her youth and be transformed into someone else. That trip was the first of three that make up this memoir. While spending as little money as possible and traveling rapidly, she often put herself in significant danger and missed what she went to experience. When Sovich decided to fly home midjourney, her husband labeled her travel style perfectly: martyrdom. He also told her to return to Africa and make her trip to Timbuktu the right way, and she listened. With experience to guide her, Sovich set out to experience the road to Timbuktu in an open, engaged way. Her descriptions of the West African countries she visited are engrossing. She captures a welcoming and friendly attitude she missed on her first trip and paints a picture of immersing herself in the lives of the people around her. Unfortunately, many of the lessons Sovich claimed to have learned don’t stick during the second trip, making her sound somewhat immature. The third trip feels confusing and unnecessary, with little to add to the narrative. Her aha-moment, supposedly reached with new insight from her travels, is described in so little detail that it seems incongruous and ill-considered rather than inspired and enlightened.
While her stories are moving and the scenery is as beautifully caught as with a camera, Sovich reaches for spiritual life lessons that fail to ring true.Pub Date: July 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-544-02595-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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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