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.
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.
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.
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.
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
THE ASCENT OF MOUNT ETNA is a demonstration of the author's resolve to fulfill a life-long dream.
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.
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.
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.
Yvonne West s JOURNEY OF MIRACLES, A 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.
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
small French village, safe from air raids and poison gas."
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
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."
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
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."
Her chapters also take the reader to Egypt and India, and in each location she captures the sights, sounds, and nuances of life.
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
an exotic locale that a good writer like West is able to bring to life.}
(From THE ELECTRONIC WRITE STUFF, April 4, 2000)
