Skillfully written account of finding hope after grief.
A Missouri hair-salon owner confronts personal tragedy by rescuing at-risk children overseas.
When her 15-year-old son Jantsen died from a heart problem in 1999, Cope’s world came crashing down. An offer from friend Carol to visit Vietnam helped draw her out of her misery. Cope found beautiful countryside marred by a population in the midst of staggering poverty levels. A visit to an orphanage put her personal suffering in perspective as she and husband Randy witnessed tiny babies and toddlers living parentless and alone. They initiated the grueling adoption process after a chance encounter with Van, a small boy curled up on a floor mat. After Van became a part of their family, Cope reflects that “rocking him to sleep every day for his nap was like a balm on my heart.” Back at home, the author solicited donations for a fund dedicated to the betterment of young lives in Vietnam, and she began appearing and speaking at area volunteer groups, social gatherings and churches, garnering varying degrees of interest in her cause. Cope’s humanitarian project truly took off when the author sold her wedding ring to increase the fund’s coffers and gave her project a name, Touch a Life. As the organization grew, other deplorable situations caught her attention: factories recruiting child laborers, young girls working the sex trade and human trafficking. The author’s charitable, compassionate nature saturates the narrative, giving it a smooth, unrushed flow. By 2001, she and husband Randy had further extended their family with other adoptions and expanded cross-cultural outreach efforts to Ghana, Haiti and Cambodia.
Skillfully written account of finding hope after grief.Pub Date: April 16, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-19969-8
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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