Each life is a journey… adventures can be found in the biographies of others. When the stories are true, they hold so much more power.
What can you find out about yourself…
…by looking at life through their eyes?
You’ll love this thought-provoking collection, because these stories run from light-hearted to heart-breaking and have plenty of amusing, witty moments to make your day.
Get it now.
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Author and editor Robert Fear’s delightful anthology contains 40 short stories that represent not a longing for a lost past but rather the celebration of human experiences so significant that they are still a hallowed and treasured part of the present.
The stories focus on a wide variety of fondly significant memories. Some are associated with the people and places of childhood and youth, some with unique adventures in far-flung places, some with cherished life events and some with unforgettable lessons taught by a volatile but ultimately compassionate world.
Each story has been selected by the editor to reflect the author’s ability to convey with beauty and clarity the triumphs and attainments, the joy and redemption that make out daily lives rewarding and worthwhile.
Reading these stories has a healing effect on our world-weary minds. They provided me with positive feelings of social connectedness, confidence, and a distinct optimism for both the present and the future.
Stories as buoyant and joyful as these offer a welcome remedy in today’s challenging world.
“Memorable life experiences” can be a bit of a trap. What is memorable for some could be quite mundane to others, depending on one’s background, life history and country of residence. To assemble this wide collection however must be a labour of love and is a bold attempt on the part of the publisher, to capture moments in ordinary lives where the extra-ordinary or out-of-the-ordinary take place.
The stories come from all over the “Five Eyes” countries, with a heavier weight from the Antipodes. The writers themselves range in age from their twenties into their seventies, with the bulk of them in the “retired and now given over to writing” category. Many have been published before and others are gainfully engaged with local writing groups, submitting work to journals and anthologies, and looking for that big break. For all the reasons mentioned above, therefore, there is an unevenness in this collection: some are strong stories, and others less so.
I quickly skimmed over the pieces that dealt with slices of ordinary middle-class life: weddings, reminiscences of ancestral household objects, memories of friends or pets, camping, teachers in classrooms etc. While they are personal experiences to the writer, some even memorable, they are the stuff of normal life and failed to excite me. The travel stories however, some written with dramatic flair and others as descriptive travelogues, held my interest, for they covered a wide part of the globe:
• Battling altitude sickness while climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro.
• The changing of the guard at a hostel when the Janata Party ousted the Congress Party in India for the first time in 30 years.
• The impoverishment of educated and cultured Cubans after Castro closed his economy.
• Fighting dishonesty without losing face in Argentina.
• Developing PTSD as a child due to a volcano eruption in Adak, Alaska.
• Bicycling in Vietnam.
• Portugal inspiring poetry.
• Fruit-pickers in Scotland behaving badly.
• Antipodean guest workers having it rough in England.
• Looking for traces of Leonard Cohen on a Greek island.
In particular, I wanted to call out the work of two writers: Ronald Mackay and Tina Mattern. Their writing went beyond the descriptive and the reflective to the dramatic. In a couple of Mackay’s pieces, he deals with the challenges of juggling farming and an academic job to pay the bills, strained marital relationships, mental illness, and death in the unforgiving Ontario farm belt. Mattern writes a string of linked stories chronicling her unhappy childhood with an abusive step-mother, her adoption by foster parents, and her attempts at go-go dancing where going topless becomes a requirement.
Overall, a mixed bag. But given the short length requirement of the pieces, each was a quick and mostly enjoyable read.