Zig-zagging by Tom Wilson -- Book Review and Tour Stop

"This game of ours always began the same. Dad would draw a picture of Ziggy happily strolling along, unaware of some horrible misfortune about to befall him. Ziggy might be zooming off a cliff, walking unknowingly into an open manhole, or oblivious to a meteor plummeting head-on his way. After Ziggy had been drawn into one of these dire circumstances, Dad would flip the placemat around, hand me his pen, and say, "Tommy, it's time for you to SAVE ZIGGY!"

This book is a cross between the memoir and inspirational genres, as Wilson writes about his experiences taking over responsibility for Ziggy from his aging father, dealing with the early death of his wife, battling depression, wrestling with faith, and finally founding his marketing firm Character Matters and finding a place for his pain and Ziggy.

I enjoyed the memoir, and wished Wilson had written more about his personal life and included fewer inspirational platitudes, although I understand why they're mixed in. The first portion of the book is the strongest, where Tom talks about his relationship with his father and how Ziggy played into that dynamic while he was growing up.

The book also has a Ziggy cartoon mixed in for every 5 pages or so--offering Ziggy's insight into the situations as Wilson relates them, which is a great touch for the book. All in all, Zig-zagging is an interesting peek into the private life of the man behind the Ziggy cartoons I love to read in the paper.

Buy Zig-zagging: Loving Madly, Losing Badly How Ziggy Saved My Life by Tom Wilson

SEE TOM DRAW ZIGGY (AND TALK ABOUT HIS BOOK):




This book is currently on tour with TLC. View the tour schedule and visit the publisher for a chance to win a copy of Tom Wilson's Zig-zagging.

I Can Help With That... Your Google Queries Answered

Google is a marvelous thing--but a few recent visitors haven't found what they were looking for... I can help with that! Behold, your (common) google queries answered!

"what's the story of macbeth about"

Witches chant, cackle and stir up trouble with prophecies. They tell Macbeth he's going to be king, and he tells his wife. Lady Macbeth thinks this sounds like a marvelous idea and persuades Macbeth to murder the king and make it happen. (What a go-getter!)

Now Macbeth is king... and he keeps murdering to make sure he stays king, and visits the witches to hear more cryptic prophecies. Lady Macbeth goes crazy and kills herself (Stress and hallucinations will do that to a person). Meanwhile, all Macbeth's murdering and tyranny has made him a bit unpopular and the English army attacks his castle. Macbeth dies in battle. All is right with the world again.

"girls playing with hari puss"

You need to work on your spelling issues, but I deciphered. What a cute girl...


"poem about loving a dead guy"

There's no one who talks about death better than Poe:

To One in Paradise
by Edgar Allen Poe

Thou wast that all to me, love,
For which my soul did pine--
A green isle in the sea, love,
A fountain and a shrine,
All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers
And all the flowers were mine.

Ah, dream too bright to last!
Ah, starry Hope! that didst arise
But to be overcast!
A voice from out the Future cries,
On! on!-- but o'er the Past
(Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies
Mute, motionless, aghast!

For, alas! alas! with me
The light of Life is o'er!
'No more-- no more-- no more--'
(Such language holds the solemn sea
To the sands upon the shore)
Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree
Or the stricken eagle soar!

And all my days are trances
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy dark eye glances
And where thy footstep gleams--
In what ethereal dances,
By what eternal streams.

Annabel Lee
by Edgar Allen Poe

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love--
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason, that long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her high-born kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre,
In this kingdom by the sea.

The angel, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me...
Yes!--that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we,
Of many far wiser than we--
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee,

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling--my darling--my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

"boeing jokes"

A blonde gets an opportunity to fly to a nearby country. She has never
been on an airplane anywhere and was very excited and tense. As soon
as she boarded the plane, a Boeing747, she started jumping in excitement,
running over seat to seat and starts shouting, "BOEING! BOEING!!
BOEING!!! BO....."

Annoyed by the goings on, the Pilot comes out and shouts "BE SILENT!"

There was pin-drop silence everywhere and everybody is looking at the
blonde and the angry Pilot. She stared at the pilot in silence for a
moment, concentrated really hard, and all of a sudden started shouting,
"OEING! OEING! OEING! OE...."

"the memory keepers daughter and libriVox"

I'm afraid you won't find any newly released books on librivox. Their catalog contains titles on which the copyright has expired, so they don't have to pay royalties. Try looking up some of those classics you've been meaning to get to!


Happy reading!

Surfing Saturday 3.14.09

Welcome to Surfing Saturdays! Each Saturday morning, I'll list any links of interest I came across during the past week of surfing and give an update on my reading progress. Play along with me! Leave your own links, or a link to your own post, in the comments!

So, where have I been this week? Check it out (only the best for you my readers):


Links:

• Feeling a little Twilight withdrawal coming on? The New York Public Library offers a list of books to read while waiting for the next tome to be published. Oh, and speaking of YA lit, check out Random Buzz, by Random House, for ARCs and other info.
• Books from Finland, a literary journal about--I'm assuming--books from Finland, launched online. There's not much content up yet, but it might be worth keeping in mind for all those international reading challenges.
• The 2009 Indie Choice Book Awards finals list is out. I know there's a few on there that I've read and several more I've been wanting to get to.
  
• What rules or guidelines do you follow when writing a book review? John Updike gave 5, and I think it's a good list.
• On a completely unrelated note--I'm loving these March wallpapers, which incorporate a calendar. Now if there were only enough days left to use them all...
  

Currently Reading:

• Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind (I have no idea where the plot is going--there doesn't seem to be one at this point in the book--but the writing is SO good!)
• Tender Graces by Kathryn Magendie
• A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore
• Hearts and Minds by Rosy Thornton
  

I was on Spring Break this week and home from university, so I got a lot more reading in than I normally have time for, although still not as much as I had planned. Still, I published 10 posts in the last 9 days, which is quite an accomplishment for me! I think I prefer the pace of 2-3 posts a week better for the long haul though--I have a limited number of original thoughts to share, and would like to make them last as long as possible.

So where have you been this week? What are your reading? Let me know, leave me a comment!

Can you beat 25?

I saw this at Debbie's World the other day and decided to copy her idea. I thought about using the Guardian list before, but 1,000 books seemed a little extensive (and unfair to anyone who reads this in a feed), so we're going with the College Board's 101 Books College Bound Students Should Read. (I remember the nightmares about this list as graduation approached senior year--I was under the impression that everyone else I went to university with would have read the entire list. After a few English classes on campus, I felt better. I go to a "highly selective" school--but I've not met anyone yet who's run the list.)

The books I've read are highlighted red. If I just highlight the author, that means I've read something else by them, just not the book listed (That counts for something, right?):

Author	Title
–	Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua	Things Fall Apart
Agee, James	A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane	Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James	Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel	Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul	The Adventures of Augie March
Bronte, Charlotte	Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily	Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert	The Stranger
Cather, Willa	Death Comes for the Archbishop
Cervantes, Miguel de	Don Quixote
Chaucer, Geoffrey	The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton	The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate	The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph	Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore	The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen	The Red Badge of Courage
Dante	Inferno
Defoe, Daniel	Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles	A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor	Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick	Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore	An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre	The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George	The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph	Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo	Selected Essays
Faulkner, William	As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William	The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry	Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott	The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave	Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox	The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von	Faust
Golding, William	Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas	Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel	The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph	Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest	A Farewell to Arms
Homer	The Iliad
Homer	The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor	The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale	Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous	Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik	A Doll’s House
James, Henry	The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry	The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James	A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz	The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong	The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper	To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair	Babbitt
London, Jack	The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas	The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia	One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman	Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman	Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur	The Crucible
Morrison, Toni	Beloved
O’Connor, Flannery	A Good Man is Hard to Find
O’Neill, Eugene	Long Day’s Journey into Night
Orwell, George	Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris	Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia	The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allen	Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel	Swann’s Way
Pynchon, Thomas	The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria	All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond	Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry	Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D.	The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William	Hamlet
Shakespeare, William	Macbeth
Shakespeare, William	A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare, William	Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard	Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary	Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon	Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander	One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles	Antigone
Sophocles	Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John	The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis	Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher	Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Swift, Jonathan	Gulliver’s Travels
Thackeray, William	Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David	Walden
Tolstoy, Leo	War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan	Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark	The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire	Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr.	Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice	The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith	The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora	Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt	Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar	The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee	The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia	To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard	Native Son

So that makes 25, plus 5 authors I've read, but not the specific works listed. I wish it was a little higher, since I graduate college next year, but I'm actually satisfied with 25%. The Three Musketeers and Things Fall Apart are two of my most recent reads, within the last few months, and Beowulf is actually in my pile of books to read. I really enjoy classic lit when I have the time to sit down and savor it. What on the list have I really been missing out on? How many have you read?

If you do a post on this, let me know and I'll add your link here!

Check out Kitten's list, she puts me to shame with 44!


Correction: I originally had 26, but realized in looking over the list that I had Catch 22, which I have not read, confused with Fahrenheit 451, which I have. That lowers my total from 26 to 25.

Girls in Trucks by Katie Crouch -- Book Review

I went to Cotillion Training School for the same reason my friends went: my mother wanted me to. This was important to her, the same way it was important to have a picture of her great-great-grandfather dressed in Confederate gray over the sideboard and for us not to be seen in Dad's truck when we were in town.

I was packing for Spring Break and trying to decide which books, out of my large TBR pile, I should carry home. I had four books started and needed to pick a few more, so I thought I would read the first page or two of the other books in the stack to decide.

Oh, the best laid plans...

I read the first 100 pages of Girls in Trucks before convincing myself to put it down and finish packing. The writing is wonderful. From the beginning I connect with Sarah. She's done the perfect daughter thing, now she wants to live her own life. The only problem is, she's not very good at it. She dates the wrong guys and can't seem to land that job she wants in New York. Life just isn't lining up like it's supposed to.

But when does life ever really go as planned, and do we want it to? I think that's what this book gets at. Everyone has goals, ideas of what their life will be like, but what happens when things don't work out? Do we change plans, or ourselves?

"Being unfaithful to yourself is not as hard as you'd think. I will never compromise myself for someone else, I always thought. I'll kill myself first. But it's so easy. It's like wearing earplugs. It's as if you've put your head under the pillow during a thunderstorm, so that all you can hear is the faint sound of muffled rain."

Girls in Trucks spans somewhere around three decades, I think, and is written more in pieces than as a novel. Sometimes I had to stop and reread to figure out how old Sarah was, which could be frustrating. The end frightened me as well, because I thought, for about 15 pages, that the author had written this great book and then was going to end it with a trite wrap-up, but she avoids that trap nicely.

This turned out to be a great read, up to all the hype I'd seen, and I can't wait for Crouch's next book.

On a sidenote: DON'T READ THE JACKET COPY. It gives too much away. Trust me, just start reading--you'll be a hundred pages in before you realize it.

Buy Girls in Trucks from amazon.com

Katie Crouch talks about her book and her experiences as a Southern gal living in New York City:



(Does she look a little like Debra Messing from Will and Grace to anyone else?)

By its cover

I saw this cover illustration and instantly wanted to read the book. It's so simple and elegant--now I'm going to have to go scrounge up a copy to read, or to frame...

Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie

From amazon.com:

Sweeping in scope and mesmerizing in its evocation of time and place, Burnt Shadows is an epic narrative of disasters elided and confronted, loyalties offered and repaid, and loves rewarded and betrayed.

August 9, 1945, Nagasaki. Hiroko Tanaka steps out onto her veranda, taking in the view of the terraced slopes leading up to the sky. Wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, she is twenty-one, in love with the man she is to marry, Konrad Weiss.

In a split second, the world turns white. In the next, it explodes with the sound of fire and the horror of realization. In the numbing aftermath of a bomb that obliterates everything she has known, all that remains are the bird-shaped burns on her back, an indelible reminder of the world she has lost.

In search of new beginnings, Hiroko travels to Delhi two years later. There she walks into the lives of Konrad’s half-sister, Elizabeth, her husband, James Burton, and their employee, Sajjad Ashraf, from whom she starts to learn Urdu. As the years unravel, new homes replace those left behind and old wars are seamlessly usurped by new conflicts. But the shadows of history - personal, political - are cast over the entwined worlds of the Burtons, Ashrafs, and Tanakas as they are transported from Pakistan to New York, and in the novel’s astonishing climax, to Afghanistan in the immediate wake of 9/11. The ties that have bound them together over decades and generations are tested to the extreme, with unforeseeable consequences.

If anyone's handing out review copies of this book, please send one my way! :)

Happy Reading!

Remember Barbie?

Barbie turned 50 this week. (She looks good for her age, doesn't she?) As I was reading a bit about Barbie's history I got to thinking how she hasn't really changed much, in 50 years. When she appeared, in 1959, it was to a storm of controversy over her sexuality, but today you don't hear that so often anymore, or at least I haven't. Then again, there's a lawmaker (a man, I might point out) in West Virginia trying to get the dolls banned from the state. For the most part, though, I think we, as a culture have changed, since we first met Barbie.

I know I have changed.

I remember playing with Barbie. She was beautiful, had a handsome boyfriend, and could be anything--a doctor, a fashion designer, a princess, an astronaut--and I was so optimistic that I could be anything too. I read hopeful books, full of strong heroes and clever heroines, books where everything always came out alright in the end.

Now I study, write, work, search for internships and cross my fingers that I'll find something. I still read hopeful books, but only with heaping doses of cynicism--if it has a storybook ending, it's unrealistic. And I read plenty of books that end in tragedy, heartbreak, and failure. There's a satisfaction in watching a character's world come crashing down around them--like a nightmare that lets you experience your worst fears outside of real life.

I know life might not turn out the way I'd like for it to. I may fail to make a difference when I take over the university magazine next year. I may fail to find a summer internship this year, or a job when I graduate next May. I may fail to find that perfect guy. I may fail to raise my children well. I may fail to do anything significant in my life ever again.

This is how I'm not like Barbie. Barbie, after all, is an eternal optimist and I'm a pessimist. But that doesn't mean I can't learn something from her sunny disposition. On the flip side, Barbie has never been a writer, or a publishing exec, so maybe someday I'll be able to teach her a few things too.

Check out Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll


The first Barbie commercial (1959):




And the commercial that introduced Ken (1961):

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake -- Book Review

Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell."

This is a gem of a work I discovered while writing a paper for my class on British Romanticism. More a piece of art than a book, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is beautiful, confusing, thought-provoking and a bit insane. My favorite part of the book is the Proverbs of Hell. Blake writes that he wanted to explain what hell is like so he brought back its wise sayings, because a people's proverbs tell you what is important to them. The list is a mishmash of contradictions. Some of the sayings could have come straight out of the biblical proverbs, while others fly in the face of Christian teachings.

Here are the first few (Read slowly, let each one sink in before you move on to the next):

"In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.

Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.

He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence."

Blake is railing against a religious establishment he doesn't agree with, in a world that has been turned inside out by the French Revolution. If you haven't read this since it was assigned to you in Lit class, pick it up again, but make sure to find an edition with Blake original illustrated pages. I think you will be pleasantly surprised by how refreshingly beautiful Blake's writings and drawings are.

Buy William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books

Changing Places by David Lodge -- Book Review

"High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. They were protected from the thin, cold air by the pressurized cabins of two Boeing 707s, and from the risk of collision by the prudent arrangement of the international air corridors."

Sometimes, you go on a date with a really great guy. He's smart, funny and considerate. He takes you somewhere fun, opens the car door for you, and asks lots of questions about where you work and what you read. You laugh at his jokes and smile and really, really want to like him because he deserves to be liked. He's perfect and gorgeous--and total not doing anything for you.

That's how I felt about David Lodge's Changing Places.

The novel follows two professors, one from California, the other from England, who switch positions for a year in an exchange program through their respective universities. They not only trade positions, however, as each finds himself mixed up in the other man's personal life and political problems. It is the first in a trilogy of campus novels and the next two in the series were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize for fiction.

I know I should like it, and I can tell it's a good book if I look at it objectively. The passages are well written and clever. The author switches from prose to letter to screenplay style with great success, and even throws in a twist at the end when you think you have it all figured out. He works in themes about coincidence and fate and politics and education without coming across as if he did it on purpose.

It should have been a good book, but I just never could get into the story or care much about the characters. I finished the book and had nothing to say, which is one of the reasons why it took me nearly three weeks to write this review.

We had a few laughs together, me and Lodge, but if this was a date, I wouldn't call him back. On the other hand, I might give his number to a girlfriend. After all, he's a catch--just not for me.

Buy Changing Places on amazon.com

Surfing Saturday 3.7.09

Welcome to Surfing Saturdays! Each Saturday morning, I'll list any links of interest I came across during the past week of surfing and give an update on my reading progress. Play along with me! Leave your own links, or a link to your own post, in the comments!

So, where have I been this week? Check it out (only the best for you my readers):


Links:

• Are you a free book fan? Check out Suvudu's Free Book Library, where you can download the first book in many of their popular series.
• Anxious to read those Kindle books on your iPhone? Amazon released the application earlier this week, although I for one don't understand how reading on that little screen could be very much fun. This reviewer agrees that a small glowing screen isn't her preferred reading method at the end of the day. (On a side note, I got to play with a Kindle for the first time this week, and not I've got the Kindlelust bad!)
• I saw this in the NYT this week, but here's the online version--in a great irony, google's plan to digitize all the world's libraries has hit a snag, and google must print ads in newspapers around the world (70 languages!) letting authors know that their books will be online unless they raise their hands and opt out of the program.
• Library Thing's early reviewers March list is up. If haven't tried this "get free books" tactic, give it a shot!
• If you haven't seen The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks yet, you should visit. I know I'm not the only one with punctuation pet peeves, but the sarcastic captions are what make me laugh every time a new post shows up in my google reader! See a few of my favorites below:
  

Currently Reading:

• Zig-zagging by Tom Wilson (I've got about 50 pages left, but you'll have to wait till the book tour for a review!)
• Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind (I have no idea where the plot is going--there doesn't seem to be one at this point in the book--but the writing is SO good!)
• Tender Graces by Kathryn Magendie
  
• Girls in Trucks by Kaite Crouch
  
• Gilgamesh translated by Stephen Mitchell (This is on the back burner, but one of these days, I'm going to finish it)

I'm on Spring Break this week! I plan to read and send out more internship applications. (If you or anyone you know is looking for an intern to read the slush pile or fetch coffee, please send me an e-mail!) I will be doing absolutely NO HOMEWORK, once I finish writing the last 10 pages for my Non-fiction writing class, due on Monday. So, I guess that means almost no homework.

So where have you been this week? What are your reading? Let me know, leave me a comment!

Book Review Policy

I'm always happy to receive book review requests at meh471 (AT) gmail (DOT) com. I enjoy a variety of genres including literary fiction, memoir, general fiction and non-fiction, chick lit, classical, and romance. I do not review poetry collections, YA novels or children's titles. I'm not a fan of vampires. I do not accept self-published titles or electronic books at this time.

I post reviews on Library Thing. I do not post to amazon.com regularly, but will if requested. I cannot guarantee that I will review every book I receive, but I will try to pass those I choose not to read along to others reviewers. I do write negative reviews. Please look at review copies, not recommended, and of course, book reviews if you would like an idea of what to expect.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions!

I've managed to gather quite a stack of ARCs, so while I'm still accepting review copies, it will probably be May before I have a chance to review any books I receive from now on.

Book Giveaway: A Lucky Child

Win a copy of A Lucky Child by Thomas Buergenthal!

Here's a description from the publisher:
Thomas Buergenthal, now a Judge in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, tells his astonishing experiences as a young boy in his memoir A LUCKY CHILD. He arrived at Auschwitz at age 10 after surviving two ghettos and a labor camp. Separated first from his mother and then his father, Buergenthal managed by his wits and some remarkable strokes of luck to survive on his own. Almost two years after his liberation, Buergenthal was miraculously reunited with his mother and in 1951 arrived in the U.S. to start a new life.

Now dedicated to helping those subjected to tyranny throughout the world, Buergenthal writes his story with a simple clarity that highlights the stark details of unimaginable hardship. A LUCKY CHILD is a book that demands to be read by all.

To enter, just leave a comment below with your name and e-mail address. Contest ends March 19. Check back on the 20th to find out if you won!

For more book giveaways, check out this week's carnival at Book Room Reviews!

It's Giveaway Week!

It's that time again... when book bloggers from all corners of the ether join together for a giveaway extravaganza! Unfortunately, I'm not participating this time around, but head over to Bookroom Reviews and check out all the other bloggers giving away great titles this week--over 90 contests last time I checked!

Good luck, and happy reading!