A rousing, exciting true story of remarkable resilience.
The extraordinary tale of a Syrian woman’s journey from her war-torn country all the way to the 2016 Summer Olympics in Brazil.
In 2004, at the age of 6, UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Mardini watched as American swimmer Michael Phelps won one gold medal after another at the Olympics. From that moment on, she wanted to do the same. It helped that her father was a swimming coach and that he pushed her and her sister, Sara, to swim daily at their local pool in Damascus. “Dad wants us to be the best swimmers. The very best. On earth. Ever,” writes the author. “His expectations are astronomical, and we’re expected to keep up….Dad has us both living like soldiers.” As the years passed, Mardini won numerous competitions. Then the war began, and she and her family were forced to move multiple times to avoid the violence. As teens, the author and her sister fled the country, crossing from Turkey to Greece by sea, where they had to swim in rough seas when the boat engine failed, before making their way to Germany, where Mardini was able to begin training again. In this moving, action-packed first-person account, the author shares the details of her journey from novice swimmer to Olympian. She eloquently describes the physical, emotional, and psychological hardships of leaving her home country and entering a new realm with the label “refugee” on her back. She had very little money and no personal possessions except a few clothes and her phone. Mardini had to endure terror, extreme hunger, and deep despair, but she also celebrates the friendships forged during those moments and the inspiring drive that kept her focused on her childhood goal of being an Olympic swimmer and of being a voice for refugees everywhere.
A rousing, exciting true story of remarkable resilience.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-18440-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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