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WALKING FOR PEACE

AN INNER JOURNEY

An intriguing story that colorfully illustrates one couple’s spiritual journey and the path we all must take to find our way.

Awards & Accolades

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In their first novel, Dojeiji and Agraso take readers through the story of their fascinating pilgrimage while offering a glimpse of their unique spiritual, physical and emotional journey.

Dojeiji and Agraso’s book details their walking journey for peace from Rome to Jerusalem. But instead of proclaiming world peace, as one might expect, Dojeiji and Agraso offer their personal pursuits for inner peace and spiritual discovery. The trip also entertains when featuring the daily grind of walking every day for more than a year and the people and places the couple sees. Dojeiji, as narrator, tells of her tales with her friend-turned-boyfriend-turned-fiancé, Agraso, and the trails and countries they walked through, the monasteries and churches they slept in as well as the draining emotional and physical demands that eventually made their walk less pleasant. The budding romance that develops between Dojeiji and Agraso keeps the story even more intriguing. Although the walk is entertaining, the spiritual journey is also deep, complex and unique. The journey takes the two far from common spiritual thought; readers are given insight into Dojeiji and Agraso’s thoughts as they come to believe in the power within themselves and the power to change circumstances through positive thinking and energy. For those not familiar with free-thinking religion—which includes Agraso taking up wizardry and Dojeiji struggling to find her place—it may be difficult to comprehend. Although their exact thoughts on God and Jesus Christ are occasionally hard to pinpoint, the message in the book is clear. Through their long walk from Rome to Jerusalem, the two discover that peace starts within each person.

An intriguing story that colorfully illustrates one couple’s spiritual journey and the path we all must take to find our way.

Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2011

ISBN: 978-1614347101

Page Count: 292

Publisher: Booklocker.com, Inc.

Review Posted Online: March 1, 2012

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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GENGHIS KHAN AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD

A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.

“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”

No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.

A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.

Pub Date: March 2, 2004

ISBN: 0-609-61062-7

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003

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