Before The Storm: Memories of My Youth in Old Prussia
Having interests in both Germany and Russia, I have been intrigued by the little piece of Russia that was part of Germany up until the end of WWII. Now known as Kaliningrad, the major city there was once known as Königsberg, and was part of the territory known as East Prussia. Today, almost everything that was part of this area's German past has been destroyed, and those surviving inhabitants were expelled around 1950. Having found out that I had relatives who lived in this area has me even more interested in finding out more about this place.
I actually read this book in the original German, and it really was fascinating. Not only does the author talk about the place and time, but her own family history and how it fit in with the history of Germany and life as part of the nobility.
The Duggars: 20 and Counting!: Raising One of America's Largest Families--How they Do It
In the 1970's, the televison show "The Waltons" was one of the biggest surprise hit shows of the decade. It depicts the life of a family with seven children as they make it through the Great Depression where they don't have much money, but they get by with love, frugality, humour, and most of all, faith in God.
Now while many people saw "The Waltons" as nostalgia of an era gone by, now we have the Duggar family from Arkansas. Far from being fiction, Jim Bob and Michelle are the parents of 19 children, who definitely live in "today's world", but have held on to those timeless qualities and traditional values. They put this book together, in large part, because of the huge amounts of emails and questions they were receiving asking for more information, primarily about how they manage to do what they do.
This book, then, attempts to answer some of those questions, and begins with a little bit about Jim Bob and Michelle as they were growing up, as they made the choice to put God first in their lives and live a life which, among other things, puts God and family first and follows such tenets as not going into debt (i.e. don't by things you can't pay for). Subsequent chapters talk about the family as it was growing and how they came to the attention of television producers, and then about some strategies that have worked for them along the way. Scattered throughout are vignettes, recipes and pictures. This is definitely a worthy read!
Everybody Pays: Two Men, One Murder and the Price of Truth
This is a very interesting case, and was featured on one of the episodes of American Justice on A&E because issues in this case was appealed all the way to the United States' Supreme Court. In 1972, Harry Aleman, a Chicago mob hitman, killed the ex-husband of one of his cousins for "harassing" her. A neighbour, Bob Lowe, witnessed the murder and, against the advice of some, volunteered to identify the killer and testify against him. Little did he know that this would be the beginning of a 25-year odyssey that would nearly destroy his own life.
This book is very well written, and hard to put down!
The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life
This book puts together a lot of amazing survival stories and tries to make sense of what commonalities these survivors have; that in the face of the greatest adversity, these people did not succumb, but came through, and in many cases, turned that adversity into growth. Instead of being a handbook of what to do in bad situations (although there are many such tips), it attempts to show the reader more general strategies of survival (i.e. there doesn't seem to be a "best" seat on an airplane to survive a crash, but rather it's much more dependent on one's attitude and actions.) The best thing about this book is the research and the follow-up to many amazing cases - the Central Park Jogger, Holocaust survivors, 9/11 survivors, etc. The major drawback to this book, however, is that it tends to be very self-referential, which becomes annoying after awhile.
Home
