Journey of Miracles

<P>JOURNEY OF MIRACLES is a travel memoir describing different countries in different eras. It covers a sixty year period beginning with 1925 and ending in 1985.<P> In KALLISTE (the most beautiful) Corsica is lovingly described by the author who as a small child lived in a mountainside villa with a panoramic view of the surrounding countryside. HAVEN FOR THE RICH AND TITLED describes the good life in the Monte Carlo of the thirties.<P> Next in THE INTERRUPTED JOURNEY we visit a small village in eastern France at the eve of World War II where the author's cousin was both the village pharmacist and a busy archaeologist. As a consequence of the outbreak of the war his unearthing of a Roman swimming pool and the adjacent villa had to be discontinued.<P> JOURNEY OF MIRACLES is the author's account of her leaving Occupied France with her family and their journey through Spain to Lisbon Portugal to board an American cargo ship for passage to the United States.<P>In NILE CRUISE we have a detailed itinerary of a six hundred mile archaeological tour of Egypt aboard a flat-bottom wooden river boat - downstream with the tide but against the stream of history<P>THE ASCENT OF MOUNT ETNA is a demonstration of the author's resolve to fulfill a life-long dream.<P>A most subjective approach characterizes a trip to Bavaria in THE ROMANTIC ROAD where the author contrasts the beauty of the landscape with the austerity of the Dachau Memorial Museum - site of the oldest Nazi concentration camp.<P>A GLIMPSE BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN describes a visit to Hungary and Czechoslovakia. In Prague the author watched an anti-American (dubbed as anti-imperialist) program on state-run television. The following day she witnessed an orchestrated street demonstration.<P>SACRED COWS AND MOGHUL PALACES is much in the form of an essay contrasting Hindu customs and architecture with the majestic buildings of the sixteenth century Islamic rulers of India.</P><P>Yvonne West´s JOURNEY OF MIRACLESA TRAVEL MEMOIR (101 pp.Xlibris) takes the reader through one of the two most interesting periods of U.S. history: World War II and its unsettling prelude. Since her family was living in Corsica and Paris she was in the middle of the drama when the family had to negotiate its way to Spain and then to the U.S.</P><P>For example one chapter opens with In 1938 during the Munich Scare when Hitler forced Czechoslovakia to give up the Sudetenland my sister Caroline and I were sent from Paris to my mother´s east-country cousin who lived in a <P>small French village safe from air raids and poison gas.</P><P>She pens excellent word pictures of such people as her cousin Tonton Do the village pharmacist: He wore a long white coat over his trousers and <P>waistcoat and always carried a gold watch and chain in his waistcoat pocket. His hobby though was archaeology abetted by an extraordinary power of divination as you will see.</P><P>In another section the memoir shows the tension that could be ever-present:Once we did hire a Corsican maid who unbeknownst to us was a <P>cousin of the bandit Romanetti and in our absence put him and his henchmen up for the night and a terrified Antonio his family and the donkey barricaded themselves inside their house for two days.</P><P>Her chapters also take the reader to Egypt and India and in each location she captures the sights sounds and nuances of life.</P><P>This well-written memoir is not trying to follow in the page prints of other books but if the readers want to judge whether they would enjoy poring over its pages they should think in terms of Tom Brokaw´s homage to the heroic generation of WW II and of Frances Mayes´ UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN. (do keep in mind that Corsica birthplace of Napoleon is French but the island offers <P>an exotic locale that a good writer like West is able to bring to life.}</P><P><P>(From THE ELECTRONIC WRITE STUFF April 4 2000)</P>