Likely to appeal only to Christian readers.
A mother’s searching memoir about how she and her family found their faith tested in the aftermath of a devastating car crash.
Baptist evangelical speaker Barrick had the perfect life. A Bible study leader, she was happily married and had two blessed children. Her son was a gifted athlete; her daughter, Jen, was a “straight-A honor student, varsity soccer player and nationally ranked varsity cheerleader” who loved God. But in 2006, tragedy struck when a drunk driver collided head-on with the car in which she and her family were riding. Her son escaped with bruises and scratches while Barrick and her husband suffered multiple fractures and severe lacerations. Jen was hurt worst of all and sustained life-threatening head injuries. Barrick and her husband struggled to come to terms with their now-shattered lives as Jen lay in a coma for over a month. Against all odds, she began to respond; even more amazingly, she started conversing with God in language that was perfectly intelligible. Like her mother and father, Jen recovered her health, but was even more profoundly changed by the accident than they were. Now brain-injured and nearly blind, she was only able to regain normal speech with great effort, although her ability to speak to God unimpaired continued to astound those around her. Barrick admits throughout to longing for a daughter who could be “normal” again. But through Jen, she came to understand that her human desires were secondary to God’s plan, which was to give her daughter “her own special place in His world.” The author’s story is moving but will no doubt frustrate secular readers, as she remains silent about other neurologically based explanations for her daughter’s remarkable abilities and recovery.
Likely to appeal only to Christian readers.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4143-6119-2
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Tyndale House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
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 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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