In celebration of National Inspirational Role Model Month, Book Buzz this week offers some touching new reads to inspire our lives. In a world of violence, injustice, greed and personal tragedy, we are renewed to find that heroism, courage and
In celebration of National Inspirational Role Model Month, Book Buzz this week offers some touching new reads to inspire our lives.
In a world of violence, injustice, greed and personal tragedy, we are renewed to find that heroism, courage and bravery still live. Survivors triumph over heartache and loss and adventurers push the limits and brave the unknown. Ordinary people overcome seemingly insurmountable odds.
The human spirit still rises to daunting challenges transforming individual lives and our world through tenacity, endurance, ingenuity, compassion, kindness and love.
Whether looking for inspiration or courage we can learn from the lives of others.
Check your public library for stories of scientists, politicians, athletes, artists, patients, mothers, friends, warriors, musicians, reporters, and ordinary people worthy of emulation.
Happy reading.
Age is Just a Number: Achieve Your Dreams at Any Stage
in Your Life
By Dara Torres
797.21092 To
From the winner of 12 Olympic medals (four of them gold), and the first American woman to compete in five Olympics comes an inspirational memoir about staying fit, aging gracefully, and pursuing your dreams. For the unlikely story of how another athlete and shy Maui boy overcame prejudice to integrate two professional sports in two countries try Wally Yonamine: The Man Who Changed Japanese Baseball by Robert K. Fitts. And for a narrative of the life of one of the most eccentric ballplayers of the 20th century try Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee by Allen Barra.
Amelia Earhart:
The Thrill of It
By Susan Wels
629.13092 Earhart We
This irresistible biography-in-pictures of the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans is rich in photographs and presents a slew of intriguing documents. The author’s brisk narrative hits all the main points, providing insight into her personal life and capturing Earhart’s spirit. In another sea voyage tale, Black Wave: A Family’s Adventure at Sea and the Disaster that Saved Them, we get an adventure story from two perspectives. John Silverwood’s straightforward sailing account interweaves the 1855 history of a ship that hit the same reef as they. Speaking from the heart, Jean Silverwood illustrates how her four children’s maturity was not only a byproduct of the sail but also the key to the family’s survival. For another remarkable adventurer’s story try Walking the Gobi by Helen Thayer.
Don’t Bet Against Me: Beating the Odds Against Breast Cancer and in Life
By Deanna Favre
362.19699 Favre Fa
At age thirty-five, Deanna Favre had it all- a loving husband at the peak of his NFL career, two beautiful daughters, a wonderful life … and breast cancer. In this candid and inspiring memoir the author testifies that with faith, hope and love ordinary people can overcome extraordinary circumstances. For those interested in the intersection of illness, family and religion try Squint: My Journey With Leprosy by the remarkable Jose P. Ramirez, Jr., which is an uplifting story of love and perseverance over incredible odds. For a local stories check out No Footprints in the Sand: A Memoir of Kalaupapa by Henry Halaielua and Leper Priest of Moloka’i: The Father Damien Story by Richard Stewart.
The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women
and a 40-Year
Friendship
By Jeffrey Zaslow
305.40922 Za
This is the inspiring true story of eleven girls from Iowa and the ten women they became. An illustration of the deep bonds of women as they experience life’s joys and challenges — and the power of friendship to triumph over heartbreak and unexpected tragedy. In Perfectly Imperfect: A Life in Progress, Lee Woodruff delivers essays about being a busy mother to
four kids and a loving wife, daughter and friend who doesn’t always know the right answers. This follows In an Instant, her memoir of healing, which is coauthored with her husband, Bob Woodruff, an ABC journalist gravely wounded in a bomb attack in Iraq.
The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of the Earth’s Antiquity
By Jack Repcheck
551.092 Hutton Re
There are three men whose life’s work helped free science from the strait-jacket of religion. Two of the three-Nicolaus Copernicus and Charles Darwin-are widely heralded for their breakthroughs. The third, James Hutton, is comparatively unknown, yet he profoundly changed our understanding of the earth, its age, and its dynamic forces. This expertly crafted narrative tells the story of Hutton and of the Scottish Enlightenment. Elsewhere in science, talented young astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s brilliant career is chronicled in George Johnson’s Miss Leavitt’s Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe. Ocean scientist and gifted storyteller Trevor Norton writes enthusiastically in Underwater to Get Out of the Rain: A Love Affair with the Sea about the bizarre, beautiful and beguiling underwater world and the eccentric characters who work, study and live by the shore.
Painting a Hidden Life: The Art
of Bill Traylor
By Mechal Sobel
759.13 So
Born into slavery on an Alabama plantation, Bill Traylor worked as a sharecropper for most of his life. He also became a self-taught lyric painter of extraordinary ability and power, creating over 1200 narrative paintings of black life. In Hawaiian Son: The Life and Music of Eddie Kamae by James D. Houston another artist, an accomplished and beloved Hawaiian musician shows where his music comes from and where it has led him.
The Storyteller’s Daughter
By Saira Shah
958.1046 Shah Sh
From the filmmaker of the acclaimed film Beneath the Veil comes a vivid memoir of a young woman shaped by the disparate worlds of a fearless passionate Afghan aristocracy and a sophisticated sensitive Western liberal. Another tale of heroic Muslim women can be found in Behind the Burqa: Our Life in Afghanistan and How We Escaped to Freedom by “Sulima” and “Hala” as told to Batya Swift Yasgur. The wartime story, The Bookseller of Kabul, by Asne Seierstad is a portrait of a proud Afghan who braved persecution to bring books to the people of Kabul. And in The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story author Diane Ackerman tells the thrilling tale of Polish Christians horrified by Nazi racism who manage to save over three hundred people by using what was available: their zoo. In Mary Ann Schaffer’s wartime homage to book lovers and nostalgic portrait of an era, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, the characters are enchanting and the small acts of heroism vivid.
War Child: A Child Soldier’s Story
By Emmanuel Jal
962.4043 Jal Ja
As a young kid barely able to carry a gun, Jal, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, witnessed and perpetrated unspeakable brutality in his country’s civil war. Jal not only found refuge in the U.S. but also became an international rap star for peace. His is a searing portrait of a war-torn youth turned community advocate and role model. In A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah, the gifted Sierra Leone writer recounts how easy it is for a normal boy to transform into someone as addicted to killing as he is to army-supplied cocaine. And in John Bul Dau’s God Grew Tired of Us, a young man speaks of terror and triumph, horror and humor, and a magnificent hard-won wisdom as he traces his African childhood and remarkable faith.
• Carolyn Larson, head librarian at Lihu‘e Public Library, brings you the buzz on new, popular and good books available at your neighborhood library. Book annotations are culled from online publishers’ descriptions and published reviews.
