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 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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