Posts Tagged ‘Biography’

The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom

Monday, December 7th, 2009

trekhomeThe true story of Slavomir Rawicz, a Pole who was arrested by the Soviets in 1939, charged with spying, and sent to a prison camp in Siberia is chronicled in the memoir, The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom.

Rawicz’s only “crime” was being a Polish officer living too close to the Russian border, and soon after arriving at the camp, he and some fellow-prisoners began planning their escape.

“We were all long-haired and heavily bearded-I had not had a haircut or shave for nearly a year.  Our clothes were the same. When we had all been herded into the yard there were about 150 men like me all holding trousers.  One hundred and fifty lost souls turning up in the same pitiful costume at some devil’s fancy dress ball.”

With the help of a sympathetic warden’s wife, they amassed warm clothing and a few days’ worth of food and set out on a trek covering thousands of miles, heading south through Siberia, through China, across the Gobi Desert, through Tibet, and over the Himalayas to freedom and asylum in British-controlled India.

Traveling mostly at night, eating snakes, rats, bark, fish, and anything else they can find, they traveled south. Their clothes became rags; for shoes, they had only rough moccasins which they would replace along the way with skins from animals they had caught. Whether sick with scurvy, or tormented by lice, the survivors never stopped walking. Six men begin the trek, and a runaway girl, along the way three died of dehydration and/or exhaustion.

After a period of madness and medical attention, Rawicz moves to England and shares his story first with his wife.  Then, as a form of therapy wrote it down for himself.  If you have ever wondered what the human spirit can endure, and what courage looks like, then this is a story for you. There are even a few surprises along the way, including a big foot sighting. The author wrote, that during his escape, he and his companion escapees saw two eight-foot tall hair-covered creatures somewhere between Bhutan and Sikkim.

This non-fiction work will keep you riveted from the first page to the last.  I highly recommend this book for any reader who is a fan of adventure/survival writing.

“I hope The Long Walk will remain as a memorial to all those who live and die for freedom, and for all those who for many reasons could not speak for themselves.”–Slavomir Rawicz

GENRE: Biography

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Posted in Adventure, Biography |

Shipwrecked! The True Adventures of a Japanese Boy

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

The law in Japan in the early 1800s stated that any person who leaves the country to go to another and later returns would be put to death. So, when fourteen-year-old Manjiro, working on a fishing boat to help support his family, was shipwrecked three hundred miles away from his homeland, he was heartbroken to think that he would never again be able to go home.

shipwreckedShipwrecked! by Rhoda Blumberg,  is the fascinating life story of a boy from Nakahama who was rescued from death by an American whaling crew and in 1843 became the first Japanese person to enter the United States. Adopted by a whaling captain and educated in Massachusetts, Manjiro later became a diplomat and samurai in Japan.

Rhoda Blumberg, who previously wrote “Commodore Perry in the Land of the Shogun“, is a talented writer of nonfiction for children. This book, for ages 9-12, is nicely illustrated with woodblock prints and Manjiro’s own drawings and tells a biography spanning 57 years in less than 77 pages.

It was on January 5, 1841 that Manjiro and four crew members set sail aboard small fishing boat and encountered a terrible storm and were marooned on a small deserted island

Six months later the castaways were rescued by Captain William H. Whitfield and the seamen aboard the John Howland, an American whaler. Because they could not return to their homeland many of the crew made Hawaii their home.

Manjiro became a full crew member and eventually arrived at New Bedford, Massachusetts. Where he was documented as the first Japanese person to set foot in the U.S. He attended school, for the first time in his life, in a one-room schoolhouse, among thirty children ages four to sixteen.

Manjiro made his fortune in the gold rush and joined two of his former castaways to be dropped off in Japanese waters. On February, 1850 Manjiro and his two friends were lowered (in a small boat) into the waters off Okinawa and arrested within 30 minutes, despite a letter from the U.S. consul in Honolulu. The castaways were on trial eighteen times and endured prison for six months.

October 5, 1852 Manjiro finally reached his homeland-almost twelve years since he had last seen his village

From that moment on, he acted as adviser to the Council of Nobles and argued for an end to the nation’s isolationist laws. With his assistance, the Treaty of Peace & Amity with the US was signed.

Manjiro began his own profitable whaling industry in northern Japan; using Western advanced technology to build typical New England whale ships and whaleboats and was the first Japanese embassy to the United States as an interpreter

I highly recommend this “School Library Journal” Best Book and ALA Notable award winning historical fiction story.

GENRE: Biography

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Posted in Biography, Historical Fiction |

Girl In a Blue Dress

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

The one story that Charles Dickens never wrote was his own, but the private life of this most public figure was – in more ways than one – the stuff from which books are made. He was a man with wild hair and a strange name who rose from child employment in a boot-blacking factory to being one of the most famous figures of his age. His story cannot ignore the scars left behind by his father’s incarceration as a debtor, accusations of ‘incest’ with one sister-in-law, the death of another in his arms and his secret relationship with Ellen Ternan, the woman for whom most modern writers assume he left his wife.
bluedressGaynor Arnold’s first novel is a retelling of Charles Dickens’s life from the viewpoint of his estranged wife, Catherine. The pair appears here in the book as that of hugely popular writer Alfred Gibson and his wife Dorothea. As the book opens, Alfred, who became the symbol of the Victorian age, who called himself the “One and Only,” is to be buried, leaving his last work unfinished, and a country mourning.

She, his wife, has not been invited to the funeral; instead, she stays home to play her piano and reflect on how she has not left her home in ten years. In that time she has only had contact with one of her children and spends her days reading and rereading her husband’s novels. She remembers once being the adoring support for Alfred’s talents, but when he fell under the sway of his new love (and distaste for his wife’s increasing bulk and growing brood), he banished Dorothea from the house — retaining her younger sister, Sissy, as housekeeper, child minder and (so it was rumored) lover. Even more humiliatingly, he took out a newspaper ad to announce that for some time his wife had been unsatisfactory — detached, ill, uninterested in motherhood or running a household — and that their separation was necessary for his own well-being and that of the children.

The fictional account is based on the Dickens’ actual lives. Author Arnold draws on the surviving correspondence that Catherine Dickens wanted preserved in the British Museum so “the world may know he loved me once.”

The author took many liberties with the story. From adding a feminist awakening in our heroine to a ghostly visit from her dead husband reminiscent of A Christmas Carole. The author alludes to a lot of rumor that circulated at the time about the author without always offering a clear answer on where she stood. As I closed the book on the last page, I found myself searching the internet to separate fact from fiction. The book encourages the reader to want to go back and read some of Dickens’s work and will fins this story a satisfying historical fiction.

GENRE: Historical Fiction

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Posted in Historical Fiction |
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