The Review Revolution: Improving Culture through Kvetching

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: Rhoda Janzen's Memoir of Going Home

When I worked at Publishers Weekly, my mailbox was constantly filling up with people’s therapeutic memoirs of recovering from conservative religions. These writers had left evangelicalism, Orthodox Judaism, Mormonism, Christian Science, you name it. All of these memoirs had a flavor of the counter-apologetic: This is why I left my childhood faith, and how my life has changed dramatically for the better since I came to my senses. Many were well-written, and some were thoughtful. But there was a sameness about them.

 

Rhoda Janzen’s memoir is different, and refreshing, in its affection for the Mennonites who raised and formed her. This is a woman who appreciates her family and her heritage even though she is no longer a believer, who holds her insular childhood religion up to the light of the larger secular world and finds in it many useful and beautiful things to carry her forward. The book doesn’t end with her coming back to the fold in a religious sense, but in a familial sense, she never really left.

 

I should back up and tell you her story, which opens with the demise of her marriage. Although a spendthrift himself, her husband Nick shows a remarkable practicality where Rhoda is concerned: when she asks his advice about a proposed hysterectomy, he reminds her of the family policy to throw out anything that hasn’t been used in over a year—organs included.  She has the operation, but it doesn’t go well, and during her weeks of recovering from a punctured bladder (fun!), Nick leaves her for a man he’s met at gay.com. In the ensuing weeks, Rhoda has a serious car accident and crippling financial problems—all of which is a whole lot funnier in the book than it sounds in this barebones relay of information—and heads home to California to recover in the arms of her Mennonite family.

 

I love the way she depicts her family. The portraits are hilarious, but they are not caricatures. Her parents are provincial in their Mennonite heritage, but they are also globe-trotting ambassadors for their faith and for social justice. Her sister Hannah is a model of intelligence, passion, and humor. Even her super-conservative brother gets mad props for allowing his daughter to pursue her love of dance despite its being verboten in Mennonite circles. This is a family of love.

 

The memoir includes some hysterical reminiscences of growing up Mennonite, from the eye-popping tightness of Mennonite braids to the top five “shame-based foods” in a Mennonite child’s school lunch. (By this, she means the most embarrassing and smelly foods that Mennonite kids did not want to be caught dead eating in front of their peers.) And while she has issues with the way her Mennonite childhood failed to equip her to challenge male authority (and may have enabled her disastrous decision to remain with Nick through years of his bipolar disorder and verbal abuse), she also credits her upbringing with a strong support system and unconditional love. And hey, she knows how to make 1,000 different recipes out of a head of cabbage. That has to be worth a lot.

 

The Science of Parenting: A Review of "Nurture Shock"

When I was about twelve years old, my mother told me something that helped me to define myself: I was not a quitter. The context of this comment was that I had just returned home, despondent, and flopped myself huffily into a chair.  For the fifth year in a row, I had not made the community theater’s summer musical. Five years I had auditioned with the best of hopes along with all the other kids, only to be cut. What my mother said, after commiserating with me in her matter-of-fact way, was how much she admired me for going back, year after year, and not giving up.  Other people were not built like that, she said. Other people would have stopped trying.

 

I did not stop trying, and when I was thirteen—after joining a choir and taking drama classes—I was cast in a non-speaking walk-on part. The next two years, I was in the all-cast chorus, with the occasional line and some group songs. The year after that, I was in a smaller chorus, and the year after that, I played Liesl in The Sound of Music. Was I great at it? Not particularly. But all this experience--and the fact that I had earned it all through hard work--improved my confidence exponentially.

 

According to the new book Nurture Shock, what my mother did was exactly right. She did not praise me for things beyond my control, like intelligence (which I possessed) or innate musical talent (which I did not). She praised me for something within my control: my determination to keep trying even when it got embarrassing.

 

The opening chapter of Nurture Shock not only takes American parents to task for the generic, insipid ways we praise our children—“Oh, you’re so smart!”—but provides some fascinating scientific research to show that praising kids for things they can’t control actually does significant long-term damage to their self-esteem. So I’m already changing the way I praise my daughter: more “I’m really proud of the way you studied every night for that science test even though you would have rather eaten tripe!” and less “You are good at science.”

 

The opening chapter may be the best, but most of the others are very strong too. Here are a few surprising things I learned:

 

• Teaching driver’s ed in school seems like a very good idea, but may actually be a lousy one. Teens who don’t get it in school often take longer to get their license, which is the best way to prevent accidents. It’s not the teenagers’ faults; it’s a problem with their brains, which haven’t yet developed appropriate cautions about risk-taking.
•  Preschools and kindergartens that let kids play for hours produce kids that score far better on standardized tests and have better behavior than those in the traditional 3 Rs curriculum who get far more limited time for free play.
• Your most important relationships as a kid may be with your older siblings. How they treat you defines you—but parents can make a huge difference by encouraging kids to play together as a team, and by making sure that older siblings learn cooperative play with their friends and peers first. The conventional wisdom that says that kids learn to play with siblings at home and then apply that knowledge to their relationships at school is precisely backwards.
• Good news! Adolescence is more traumatic for teens’ parents than it is for the teens themselves. Parents are more affected and depressed by conflict than their teens are, and more likely to view fights as counterproductive.

 

Undoubtedly, some of the research Bronson and Merryman tout in this book will be scrutinized and even debunked someday, but some of it will stick. For myself, I have started to follow the authors’ NurtureShock Twitterfeed. Unfortunately, they’ve recently stopped doing their blog on the science of parenting for Newsweek, but you can still access some fascinating archived posts here.

 

Playing Video Games with God: A Conversation with Craig Detweiler on Gaming and Religion

The coolest part of my job is acquiring interesting new books about cutting-edge developments in religion. So I was especially excited when theologian/filmmaker/author Craig Detweiler approached me a little over a year ago with an idea for Halos and Avatars, a book about religion and video games--possibly the world's first-ever book-length exploration of the theological implications of gaming. The book hit stores last week; you can listen to the WJK Radio interview with the author here or check out his blog,  Purple State of Craig (lots of good recent film reviews, especially from Sundance). Here's a short e-conversation about the book.

How did you get the idea for Halos & Avatars, and why do you think the book is important?

My first book, A Matrix of Meanings: Finding God in Pop Culture ostensibly covers most forms of media including sports, advertising and fashion.  I had a student at Fuller Seminary who wanted to know why we didn't cover video games.  I didn't have a good answer.  We simply didn't get around to it, perhaps because we (my co-author, Barry Taylor, and I) aren't digital natives.   The student who pushed me, Kevin Newgren, actually has a chapter in Halos and Avatars on the power of BioShock to spark serious soul searching.    So I love when students challenge you...:)

When we hear "religion" and "video games" in the same sentence, it's usually because someone in the church is decrying games as time-wasters as best or violent harbingers of societal doom at worst. Why have Christians been so down on video games?

Rachel Wagner has a fascinating chapter in Halos and Avatars about how uncomfortable seemingly open-ended games may be to those who adhere to a closed canon.  We don't want to think about manipulating Jesus or altering the outcome of the game of life.   It all seems fixed in many religious mindsets.    So perhaps the volitional aspect of gaming that makes it so attract to young players actually makes it appear 'anti-institutional' or 'anti-dogma' to those passing on a seemingly closed set of beliefs or practices.I'm intrigued by how game designers may collapse the ancient tension between predestination and free will.    The game has a clear, foreordained outcome, but how you reach that end has myriads of possibilities.

What do video games have to teach us about the power of story and about the gospel?  

It was difficult to see something deep or thoughtful behind Pac-Man or Space Invaders.  The basic goals and storyline are so simple.   But most adults don't realize how quickly games have matured.   The scale of the stories is immense--much larger than the most ambitious movies in terms of size and complexity.   So many of us are just now waking up to the narrative power of games. The most popular games often have the most ambitious storylines. Halo is a great critique of blind faith.   It challenges players to dig deeper, to not accept everything you've been told at face value. Games also allow players to tap into a much larger struggle, often on a cosmic scale.   In Halos and Avatars, Dan Hodge writes about how video games offer players a chance to participate in "ultimate battles," to play an essential part in the grandest narratives we can imagine.   At their best, games offer us a taste of heroism and call us toward virtues of sacrifice, honor, and integrity.  At their best...

What do you think lies in store for the future of gaming and spirituality?

We're just finished a golden era in gaming.   The technical advances were immense.   But the next wave of games will have to do more than "wow" players.   They will have to combine eye-popping effects with enduring questions of humanity--why are we here, what is our purpose, how should we live.   Questions of responsibility have already crept into "God games" like Civilization and The Sims.   As we struggle with limited resources on the planet, a generation steeped in simulation game like The Sims will have already wrestled with those vexing realities. The gaming generation will offer a major challenge to religions rooted in sacred texts like The Bible.  How can a static text be translated into a dynamic document?   How can the thrills and chills of scripture be communicated to a generation used to actively responding to challenges?  That will be a serious hurdle for institutionalized religions...

And now, true confessions time: which games do you play, and how much?

All of us wrestle with limited time amongst all kinds of electronic entertainment--from TV and films, to Facebook and email.   So my game time corresponds to my kids' interests.   For my children, the Wii rules.   I've logged many hours of Mario Kart, competing for the Mushroom Cup.   And reliving Indiana Jones as a Lego character.   That is the strangest and coolest at the same time....  

What to Do When You're So Sad You Can't Get Out of Bed: Laugh and Cry Along with "Beyond Blue"

After my daughter was born, I had what you might call post-partum depression. Despite my joy about the baby, I was often sad and overwhelmed. I would dissolve in tears at the slightest provocation. The reading I did wasn't much help: the parenting literature said that some women would experience the "baby blues," but this would dissipate after a few days. Mine didn't. It went on, like a literal weight on my shoulders, until my daughter was several months old. And while I was adept at hiding it from the world, the pain remained with me constantly.

Not coincidentally, it magically lifted about a week after I stopped breastfeeding. I had more energy. I could return to writing my dissertation, and be excited about a new job I'd taken. I had joy in my friendships and especially in the infant life entrusted to me. I felt confident and happy again.  I walked out of that black fog of depression with a new compassion for people who feel that hopeless all the time, whose brain chemistry or hormones or neurological structure make it difficult for them to experience joy. I was lucky that the nursing-mother version of me, with hormones all out of whack, was a temporary aberration.

And that's all it is, really -- just luck. As Therese Borchard points out in the excellent and bracingly funny memoir Beyond Blue: Surviving Depression & Anxiety and Making the Most of Bad Genes, some people are predisposed to forms of mental illness, just as others are predisposed to breast cancer or cystic fibrosis or thinking Gilligan's Island was a really good show. We don't judge people for contracting cancer (well, unless we're Rhonda Byrne in The Secret; see here for my snarky review), but we sure as hell feel comfortable telling depressives to snap out of it or people suffering from acute anxiety to just chill out. This adds to the culture of shame about mental health problems, a shame so pervasive that this blog post is the first time I've ever publicly admitted to having had PPD. Take that, Tom Cruise.

Therese is someone I'm lucky to call a friend, one of many people who started out as a work colleague but became special to me. (In fact, I make an unnamed cameo in the book as the magazine editor on p. 168.) She is hugely smart and talented and funny in a way that reminds me of Anne Lamott. And like Lamott, she's had her demons, including alcohol, depression, and anxiety. Add to that obsessive-compulsive tendencies and struggles with an eating disorder and you have a recipe for the psych ward, which is where Therese wound up a few years ago -- twice. And while the book does not flinch from all the pain in Therese's past, it is ultimately a hopeful and healing memoir. Redemptive, even, as Therese has dedicated her life since fighting back from the brink to helping other people talk about mental illness and spirituality. Her Beliefnet blog, also called Beyond Blue, has taken off in readership and was named one of the top ten blogs on depression by PsychCentral.com. She has dedicated her life to "making mental illness less scary to those of us who live it and to educating as many people as possible as [she] can about mood disorders so that we can permanently remove the unfair stigma associated with depression and bipolar disorder." And she does this with the hilarity of the edgiest chick lit novel. You go, girl.

Why Good Editors Earn Their Keep: A Review of “The Girl Who Played with Fire”

Sophomore efforts rarely surpass their debut predecessors, and this sequel to the absorbing thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo suffers from the usual sophomore slump. What continues to be most compelling, if over-the-top unrealistic, is the titular character of Lisbeth Salander, who is the tiny Swedish version of a superhero. She may not be faster than a speeding bullet, but . . . . She can hack into any computer in the world! She solves Fermat’s theorem without a computer! She’s a chess whiz who has never studied the game! She has a photographic memory! She can take down two Hell’s Angels despite weighing only ninety pounds! Oh, and in this book she also literally rises from the dead. Your move, Wonder Woman. Top that.

 

Salander is so far from a typical heroine that one almost feels guilty rooting for her. Although she has a moral center, her take on reality is not exactly normal, and when someone crosses her, Salander’s vengeance is as swift as it is unflinching. In this book we do come to understand some of the back story that has made Salander who she is, and Stieg Larsson does a terrific job of bringing her childhood to life.

 

What’s wrong with this book is that it apparently had no editing. At all. Despite some unexpectedly terrific characterizations and a strong idea for a plot, the story often fizzles. In part this is because of the first 100 pages, which are largely irrelevant to the rest of the story. The novel has the feel of a lot of rookie fiction, where an inexperienced author began taking the story in one direction, then changed his mind but neglected to revise. A good editor adds value by lopping off the unnecessary or distracting material (which is admittedly often painful to the novelist, who is a bit too enmeshed to see the big picture). The editor draws out the best stuff, ties up the loose ends, and banishes the early draft material.

 

That did not happen here.  The novel begins with Salander having a completely separate adventure in the Caribbean, where she solves a mystery that turns out to be wholly unrelated to the rest of the story and features characters that we never hear from again. It’s bizarre not only from an artistic perspective (this is so amateurish it’s hard to believe it is being published in the US by FSG) and a commercial one (what book marketer in her right mind couldn’t see that the real value here would be in selling the first 100 pages in a separate Kindle edition as a novella about Salander’s lost year? Ka-ching!).

 

I am aware that the author died after turning in the manuscripts for these books.  That’s sad and damned inconvenient, but it’s still no excuse for the lack of editorial intervention.  A dead author does not let a live editor off the hook. This could have been a great book; instead, it is merely a decent one.

 

Good editors correct their authors’ oversights, both large and small. Large oversights can be things like the fact that Stockholm comes across as a small town of about 35,000 people, where you keep running into the same people and everyone is intimately connected. (Apparently it actually has more than one and a quarter million inhabitants.) Some contrivances like this are forgivable in a thriller because they are necessary to move the plot along, but when the plot repeatedly hinges upon such chance meetings, it becomes more and more improbable. Small oversights are problems like the size of Salander’s luxurious new apartment, which is described as cavernous at 3,800 square feet. When Blomkwist visits the apartment, he realizes that Salander actually only lives in three of the rooms, and that the other eighteen are unused.  Since there appears to be only one spare bedroom besides the one she sleeps in, what we have here is a two-bedroom apartment that is under 4,000 square feet but has a total of twenty-one rooms. Not very likely, unless those rooms are closets.

 

Yes, I realize I am being quite nitpicky here, but that is what editors do: remove mistakes, eliminate distractions, and excise any plot element that beggars belief. One thing the editor seems to have done, which is actually irritating, is interrupt the thriller periodically with footnotes about incidents or people in Sweden. Footnotes! In a potboiler! As if stupid American readers couldn’t Google what we didn’t understand.

 

 And yet I enjoyed reading the book. It’s fascinating, and Salander is an unforgettable character. Despite the ridiculously slow start, the rest of the novel adopts a brisk pace and is hard to put down. It would have been even more enjoyable had the editor not fallen asleep at the switch. I will give the third book a try when it comes out in May.

Bite the Hand That Reads You: "The Historian" Comes to Audio!

Got a long drive coming up for the holidays? Then treat yourself to this 2005 armchair-traveling adventure story, cut down to size in a spiffy new abridged audio version. Think of it as Rick Steves meets Bram Stoker with a little bit of Buffy thrown in. (If she had a Romanian accent and only one outfit.)

I loved The Historian when it came out in 2005. In addition to being a fascinating bibliomystery and contributing to vampire lore (these vamps have to bite their victims three times—three!—in order to spawn new vampires), it’s a love song to the disappearance of history as we know it. By the time of its publication, the 1930s and 1960s research worlds depicted in this book were already disappearing. Gone were the days when a distant monastic library had the world’s only extant copy of a particular 16^th-century letter, map, or ledger. Far from a Van Helsing adventure story, this cat-and-mouse tale takes place primarily in the dustiest archives and most stately libraries of Europe. Kostova’s Dracula has a special fondness for biting librarians (and really, who wouldn’t?), and he spends his undead days (well, nights) tracking down rare incunabula , mostly about himself.  Nowadays he would just Google himself and be done with it.

Back to the audio. I was not certain how well this book—which, after all, hitches its wagon entirely to the star of the irreplaceable printed word—would translate to audio. Would listeners be able to catch the tiny nuances of Kostova’s skillful evocation of place? Her postmodern multi-character narration?

I’m happy to report that the audio version is a triumph. The eerie music used during transitions and flashbacks helps to create the mood, drawing on Gregorian chant and orchestral undercurrents to highlight the tensions in the story. The reader's theater-style performances are terrific, especially the actress who plays Helen Rossi. Moreover, this has always been a book that was crying out to be abridged, as the print version could be ponderous at times. Remember that bone-dry journal article that took up 15 pages in the print novel? It’s gone, as are some of the minor throwaway characters.  I didn’t miss any of it.

I do have one major complaint. The box boasts that the package contains an audio preview of The Swan Thieves, Kostova's new novel that's due out in January, but I couldn't find it on any of the ten discs. (Actually, the box says that it will contain “a audio preview”—another example of a copy editor falling asleep at the switch.) I also couldn't find the promised pdf of the cast of characters, which would have been very helpful in figuring out which actor played what part. Most of them seem to have played more than one role, and they did this so well that it was not immediately apparent just by listening to the audio. In all, though, this was great to listen to.

Holding Up "Half the Sky": Why You Should Read This Book

Before we talk about Half the Sky, which has been featured lately on NPR, Oprah, and the authors' own New York Times, here are a few opening questions for you.

1. Which of the following three methods has proven most effective in decreasing teenage pregnancy in Africa?

a) Abstinence education

b) Sex education, including contraceptive information

c) Free school uniforms for girls

2. When a young woman is raped in Pakistan, the consequence is often that:

a) She commits suicide to restore honor to her family.

b) The authorities intervene to arrest and imprison the perpetrator(s).

c) Her family hires an arsonist or killer to exact revenge on the perpetrator(s).

3. One of the most cost-effective ways to help women in developing countries is:

a) Micro-lending.

b) Building new schools.

c) Investing in maternal-fetal care.

The answers are C, A, and A. Surprised? I was. In this brave and unforgettable book, journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn travel throughout Asia and Africa to gather the stories of women and social change. Various chapters deal with women sold into prostitution and slavery, efforts to educate girls in poor villages, attempts at economic mobility through micro-lending, and the dangers in pregnancy and childbirth around the world. (Interesting fact: apparently there are a couple of different types of female pelvises, one that is well-equipped for childbirth and one that is too narrow.  In Africa,the extremes of these two types are both present--think of Mma Ramotswe and the "traditionally built African lady" versus a Kenyan marathon runner--and maternal health care does not work to save the marathon types, who are more likely to have obstructed birth and its attending complications.)

Parts of this book are emotionally tough to read. There are accounts of girls sold into slavery, women whose families demand their suicides if they are so unfortunate as to be raped, and stories of mothers killed by gross medical negligence. I think I am going to have a difficult time convincing women in my book club that this is something we need to read. It's not light, but it is tremendously hopeful, even uplifting, as stories of systematic oppression are balanced by powerful examples of women who are striking back and making a difference by founding schools, hospitals, and charitable organizations.

This should not be dismissed as a left-leaning book for bleeding heart liberals. One of its most surprising and welcome aspects is its balanced criticisms of misguided efforts on the part of the left and the right. For every critique of a conservative policy to emphasize abstinence-only education, there is an equally cogent critique of liberal do-gooders' anemic recommendations to legalize and regulate prostitution. With journalistic rigor, the authors question the inflated statistics that some liberals have bandied about in their efforts to make problems seem even more urgent than they actually are (e.g., the numbers of people enslaved around the world today). It's rare that I read a political book where I feel that great care has been taken to unpack what certain statistics really mean,and where the authors are more concerned with explaining complex issues than with driving an agenda.

Hey U2 Fans! Check Out Greg Garrett's "We Get to Carry Each Other"

I recently got the honor of interviewing author Greg Garrett for WJK Radio, which you can check out here.  His book We Get to Carry Each Other: The Gospel According to U2 was released a few weeks ago. 

I'm not a diehard U2 fan, but I've always enjoyed their music, and the book gave me a new appreciation for the depth of their lyrics.  One thing I noticed when I was prepping for the interview, listening to "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," is that the refrain is repeated after searching for the girl, climbing the highest mountain, AND being redeemed by God.  In other words, that spiritual restlessness doesn't quite end when a person finds a home in God. We're still on the journey, still looking for answers.

Greg tells some really interesting stories in the interview (including the time when he got to interview the band back in the day for a music magazine and Bono audaciously claimed that they would become the most important band in the world).  My favorite is the one he tells about Bono's death threats in the mid-80s when MLK's birthday was about to become a holiday-- a move that Bono had publicly supported.  I won't spoil the story, but it actually moved me to tears during the interview.  It's also in the book.

Unlikeliest Bestseller of the Decade So Far?: A Review of "The Elegance of the Hedgehog"

Call me intellectually lazy, but a class-themed novel written by a Parisian professor of philosophy and translated from the French is not immediately my idea of a good time.  But 1.2 million Frogs can't be wrong, right?  That's how many copies this novel sold in France in hardcover.  Hardcover, I say! . . . and since there are only around 62 million people in all of France, that means that one in 60 Frenchpersons rushed out to buy this book in the first year it was out.  It sold more copies, and stayed on the bestseller lists longer, than even Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code.  Which is partly set in France, and which, while idiotic and poorly written, features a hot, chic female codebreaker. So the superior sales performance for The Elegance of the Hedgehog is really saying something about the French. They are smarter than we are, plus they have genuine, actual food and a 35-hour work week.  But I digress.

Here's another thing.  What bestseller has a hedgehog in the title?  Hedgehogs are for children's books, and possibly how-to books on eliminating garden pests.  They are not the fodder of lasting literature. Yet a hedgehog (herisson) is in the title of the French novel and it remained there even in the American version, when someone in some publishing meeting somewhere must have surely suggested that this be changed to "vampire" for improved marketability in the current retail climate. Yet hedgehog remained in the title.  Long, meandering, beautifully written passages on French philosophy and Russian literature and Japanese film remained in the book.  And thus was born a very deserving, but entirely improbable, bestseller.

I won't bore you with long discussions of the novel itself, because I hereby order you to read it and fully expect that said order will be obeyed.  The book is beyond smart, and yet not pretentious.  The plot, such as it is, revolves around the middle-aged, bunion-y, unattractive concierge of a fashionable Parisian apartment building.  Unbeknownst to the snotty residents of 7 Rue de Grenelle, she has a ridiculously vibrant intellectual life behind the closed doors of her loge.  Her secret comes to light only upon the arrival of a new tenant, who strikes up an unlikely friendship with the precocious 12-year-old girl in the flat above him.  The three characters recognize in one another a certain kinship of spirit, and their friendship enlivens them all.

It's not much of a plot to be sure. But as you can tell, I found this book thoroughly delightful and believe I will re-read and consult it for years to come.  As a publishing professional I find its success inexplicable and thus absolutely delicious.  From a planned first print run of 4,000 copies, the book has sold more than four million so far around the world.  Maybe there is hope for reading yet.

A Review of THE SECRET HOLOCAUST DIARIES

Sometimes, the story of a memoir’s publication is almost as interesting as the life it recounts.  Russian immigrant Nonna Bannister (1926-2004) lived happily with her American husband for decades before finally telling him about her sufferings during the Holocaust, where she was a forced laborer for the Germans.  Throughout the war she carried with her a pillow in which she had sewn her photographs, documents, and the diary she kept in several different languages. Now, more than six decades later, the diary is finally available to the public, and it’s one of those books that just about everyone should read.

The first chapters of the memoir depict an idyllic-sounding childhood in Russia and Ukraine.  Born into a privileged family in 1926, Nonna heard stories of how her Cossack grandfather had been butchered by the Bolsheviks, and how her grandmother had saved the family by fleeing to another part of the country.  As a child in an increasingly repressive Stalinist state, Nonna suffered somewhat because her father was Polish, but for the most part escaped the brutality around her. Nonna had a magical childhood with loving parents, family servants (rare for the period), interesting family friends (including the Solzhenitsyns), and a formidable but doting babushka who had the whole extended family in for summer and winter holidays at a 37-room country house. She steeped the grandchildren in the liturgies of the Orthodox Church long after it was safe to do so.  This was a religious heritage that Nonna would cling to during the cruel years to come.

After war broke out in 1939, everything was in chaos for the family.  In an effort to protect Nonna’s older brother, her parents sent him away to school—a separation that turned out to be permanent, as he was never heard from again.  Other relatives fled to stay ahead of the Germans, also with tragic results.  Because of this, Nonna’s parents made the decision to stay put and try to live out the Nazi occupation of Russia and Ukraine.  I won’t give all the details away (though the chapter titles do), but this also turned out to be a disastrous decision, and through a variety of events Nonna and her mother were transported to Germany to serve in labor camps.  Two unforgettable scenes involve events that occurred on the train into Germany.  In the second, Nonna barely escaped with her life, and the horror of the mass execution she witnessed will remain with the reader long after closing the book.

This is not a perfect memoir.  There are too many Editor’s Notes, which give the diaries a jerky feel and distract from the story.  But readers will come away with a profound admiration for Nonna’s indomitable will to survive and her determination to forgive and to find the good in humanity.