Lit List: Escape From Mariupol A Survivor's True Story by Adoriana Marik As Told To Anna K. Howard; Humans Without Borders by Madhava Kumar Turumella, and Anna and Reggie Rapasaurus by William F. Harris and Stacey Roberts, Illustrated by Poormina Madhushani

 Lit List: Escape From Mariupol A Survivor's True Story by Adoriana Marik As Told To Anna K. Howard; Humans Without Borders by Madhava Kumar Turumella, and Anna and Reggie Rapasaurus by William F. Harris and Stacey Roberts, Illustrated by Poormina Madhushani

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

Escape From Mariupol: A Survivor's True Story by Adoriana Marik As Told To Anna K. Howard

A longer and more detailed version of this review is on LitPick Reviews.

Adoriana Marik is a tattoo artist and merchandiser who lived in Mariupol during the Russian-Ukrainian War. Escape From Mariupol recounts her personal experience living from the invasion, to her attempts at surviving in a violent world, and her eventual escape to the Czech Republic and the United States.

Marik’s book is a detailed, moving, suspenseful, and graphic account of the reality of living in a country torn apart by war. Her descriptions such as walking zombie-like and numb through a devastated almost apocalyptic city is a true moment of heartbreak.

These moments evocatively capture the angst of the average citizen when they are caught unaware in a situation that shatters the world around them.

There are also passages where Marik conveyed the desperation and sacrifice of surviving in a violent world and the resilience to help others in the same situation. For example,Marik took her dog, Yola, to every location and made sure wherever she went, her fur baby came with. Marik kept hold of her pet out of unconditional love and to care for someone during those dark days. Marik even cited Yola as a motivation for her to stay alive and keep going during the war.

Marik's survival instincts continued as she sought refuge in the Czech Republic and United States. She moved from place to place taking pleasure in the few little things that she could, a drink of fresh water, some biscuits, a friendly face, a warm bed, and of course Yola’s loyal presence.

Escape from Mariupol, reveals Marik as a complex woman of great strength, spirit, and courage to survive, leave a world torn apart by war, and then to recount her experience with her own words.

Humans Without Borders by Madhava Kumar Turumella

Madhava Kumar Turumella’s Humans Without Borders is an idealistic and hopeful plea for everyone to reach beyond borders and personal identification and to help others on a global, selfless, altruistic scale. To help other people because they are human beings and part of a wide global community instead of thinking of someone as being from another country, race, religion, sexuality, or identity.

Turumella reveals many of the mindset traps that people fall into like exploitation and cognitive dissonance when they categorize, place, and then use others for their own gain. They think of people as “the Other” and create tighter restrictions against them, deny them refuge, and treat them horribly once they arrive. When those mindsets are displayed, dehumanization inevitably follows and it becomes easier to threaten, attack, commit violence, isolate, and eventually kill someone else. Turumella illustrates how easy it is to fall into those mindsets, especially ignorance and cognitive dissonance based on our own limited personal experiences and assumptions. No one is immune from thinking this way but it is important to recognize and make active efforts to change that mindset, think about others, and reach out to help them.

While borders can never truly be erased and it is important to recognize one's home country, Turumella instead offers a way for Readers to minimize the importance of those borders and for governments to be more open and accepting in offering aid, resources, security, and sanctuary to other countries. The European and African Union are examples that while flawed (Turumella cites Brexit and the problems preceding it as one example), still feature countries making consistent and meaningful efforts of working together to create positive change not for one country, but for all of them.

There is one formatting issue that I must address. The chapters are numbered differently than they are in the Table of Contents. It can make for difficult reading especially if the Reader reads the book in E-book format and uses the links to lead them to the chapter. However, this flaw does not deter the book from its central themes.

Turumella insists that this book is not a call for revolution. It is not an altogether new or novel idea either. Instead it is a call for unity, understanding, empathy, and kindness. It is a reminder that while we may have our differences, we are all human.

Anna and Reggie Rapasaurus by William F Harris and Stacey Roberts, Illustrated by Poormina Madhushani

William F. Harris, Stacey Roberts, and Poormina Madhushani worked together to create a bright, vibrant, entertaining children's picture book about friendship and the importance of reading and learning.

Anna, a human girl, loves hanging out with her best friend, a dinosaur named Reggie Rapasaurus. One of their favorite things to do is going to the library and read books together. The book explores all of the imaginative adventures the two take as they read.

This is an engaging story that encourages a love of reading in its young Readers. The two imagine themselves in faraway places like the desert and explore and learn new things about the stars through the power of books.

Reading encourages bonding and communication and the book skillfully explores that through its own words. There is a rhythmic quality to the words almost like a rap number. Some of the pages like “You are a good reader like Anna and Reggie. Reading opens your eyes, so clap your hands, make a wish! Clap your hands, make a wish!” encourages participation and interaction.

The illustrations are bright and vibrant. They reflect Anna and Reggie’s daily routine at the library and the more fanciful trips through their imagination. Reading is exciting when people can imagine the worlds envisioned through the words on the page.Madhushani shows that transition between reality and imagination beautifully.

Through the engaging words and bright illustrations, Harris, Roberts, and Madhushani (as well as Anna and Reggie) reveal the book’s theme, “United we read, together we grow.”

Weekly Reader: You Got To Read This Book: 55 People Tell The Story Of The Book That Changed Their Life Edited by Jack Canfield and Gay Hendricks; Beautiful Affirmative Stories About The Importance of Reading

Weekly Reader: You Got To Read This Book: 55 People Tell The Story of The Book That Changed Their Life Edited By Jack Canfield and Gay Hendricks; Beautiful Affirmative Storied About The Importance of Reading





By Julie Sara Porter


Bookworm Reviews





Here at the Bookworm Reviews, I believe that the right person could be matched to the right book. Sometimes you are going along with your day. You have a question about your life or are so stressed that you need escape. You pick up a book and BOOM! You find parallels to your situation. You find characters that are struggling with situations similar to yours. You may even find a truth that fits and that you can use in your daily life. You consider it a favorite book that you keep coming back to again and again and find something new every time you read as well as a friend who always has your back. (The book that fits that in my life is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll which I reviewed in my inaugural review for this blog.)





Jack Canfield, co creator of the Chicken Soup books and Gay Hendricks, president of the Hendricks Institute and author of several self-help books understood that power that books have to transform lives. They gathered many of the best writers, spokespersons, musicians, artists, entrepreneurs, and leaders to describe the books that changed their lives, helped them look at their world differently, and gave them solutions to their problems in their book You Got To Read This Book.





Many of these authors found fictional characters that related to them. Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of Deep End of the Ocean found herself in Francie Nolan, the protagonist of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. Both came from impoverished backgrounds, had troubled childhoods, and had imaginative spirits that allowed them to become writers. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn captivated Mitchard so much that she reads it before she begins working on a new novel and when she adopted a daughter, she named her Francie Nolan.





Another person who found an answer through a fictional character was fifth grade teacher, Rafe Esquith. After Esquith won the Walt Disney Company's 1992 Teacher of the Year award, he felt like a failure because many of his students got involved in drugs and gang violence in middle and high school. Reading To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee helped Esquith understand through Atticus Finch what it means to be a good leader and role model for children. That he has to do what is right even if he doesn't see the positive results right away.





Self-help books are some of the books that are cited most often that helped people. Motivational speaker, Lisa Nichols found assistance reading Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey's book particularly the haunting “Begin With The Ending” exercise (where Covey invited the Reader to imagine they are at their own funeral) moved Nichols so much that she strove to change her life. She withdrew from habits that she didn't want to be remembered for (like hosting lingerie parties and writing steamy romance novels), cut abusive men from her life, and started a career that appealed to her talents for speaking.





In a true case of “physician heal thyself”, Covey himself has a chapter in which he cites two books: Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl and A Guide for the Perplexed by E.F. Schumacher. Both books gave Covey the vision to choose how he dealt with life. Frankl's book was about his time in a concentration camp and how he chose to seek happiness even in the worst circumstances such as when the Nazis burned his manuscript, Frankl just decided to “rewrite it: make it better.” This attitude was the framework for Covey's 7 Habits in which the book explores how we react when things upset or detain us.





Of course these books don't offer quick solutions and many of the authors describe that the book was simply the catalyst and the first step to a life of self-improvement. Malachy McCourt, author of A Monk Swimming, acknowledges a biography of Mahatma Gandhi that inspired him to become more spiritual. He even later took a trip to India to see Gandhi's memorial and vow to change his life to fit his. However, McCourt did not live a subsequent exemplary life. Instead it was one of alcoholism, divorce, and self-loathing to the point where a doctor gave him a prescription to change his life or else. While McCourt reveals that his transformation was a long time, the biography of Gandhi was the inspiration that began this chain of events.





Some chapters recount not how much the person loved the book but how much they hated it and disagreed with the message. Holocaust survivor, Max Edelman selects surprisingly Mein Kampf for his chapter. He selected it because of how much it changed Germany and the world. Edelman analyzes Hitler's anti-Semitism argument by saying that he used one specific point to unite the Germans. Besides taking an analytic approach to Hitler's arguments, Edelman vowed to live a life of forgiveness and love especially in the face of his enemies such as Neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers. Edelman said that Mein Kampf gave him the strength to become a counter example to Hitler's hateful words.





The most important thing that this book teaches the Reader is that the books don't change the person, the person does. This is particularly evident with Dr. Bernie Siegel, retired pediatrician and general surgeon who selected William Saroyan's The Human Comedy. He begins his chapter with “I don't believe that any book can change your life only you can. Look two people read the same book. One is inspired while the other is bored. It's the person-not the book-that creates the transformation. That power lies within each of us. That said I do believe that an author's insights when combined with the reader's inspiration and desire to change can lead to a new life for the reader.”





So in effect, it's not the book but it is the Readers that changed their lives.