Profound, elegantly written ruminations on the exquisite splendors of life enjoyed through a secular lens.
The daughter of the prestigious “astronomer of the people” offers ethereal wisdom and worldly guidance based on the philosophy of her parents.
Sagan’s debut, a lushly written amalgam of memoir and manual, traces her life as the daughter of Carl and writer/producer Ann Druyan and how she came to appreciate the wonder in the everyday. Raised in a secular household, the author was educated through straightforward scientific explanations, but her father’s death when she was just 14 left more questions than answers. More than two decades later, she carries on his guiding principles within her own family. In her first book, she ponders a variety of rapturous events, milestones, ancestral influences, and sage affirmations on life and death. The author offers commentary on her and her husband’s semi-sacred daily rituals, affording readers intimate glimpses into their coupling, wedding ceremony, joyful togetherness, misunderstandings, and sweet reconciliations. She shares fond memories of her family home, where world history frequently became an educational opportunity, and reveals the reverent methods she now employs to spiritually reconnect with the memory of her beloved father. Sagan’s narrative is heavily steeped in rituals: lighting candles, costuming, or meditating on and celebrating significant events and milestones in her life. Early in the book, the author remarks on the staunch secularity of her parents, an independent perspective and lifestyle passed down to her and her family. She open-mindedly explores the differences between those who have become ossified by religious protocol and those who rejoice in unfettered enjoyment of the natural world and the science underlying nature’s beauty. “Religion, at its best, facilitates empathy, gratitude, and awe,” she writes. “Science, at its best, reveals true grandeur beyond our wildest dreams. My hope is that I can merge these into some new thing…as we navigate—and celebrate—the mysterious beauty and terror of being alive in our universe.”
Profound, elegantly written ruminations on the exquisite splendors of life enjoyed through a secular lens.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1877-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
