Memoirs on Adversity discussion

Out Of Darkness: A Memoir
Author: Zoltan Torey

3 Stars = I liked the book. I'm glad I read it.

Zoltan was born in Hungary in 1929. In this book he talks about growing up there, how he managed to escape when it came under Soviet control, and his eventual move to Australia. At the age of 21, in Sydney, Australia, he was involved in an industrial accident that blinded him, and injured his vocal chords to such an extent that he could only speak in a whisper. After he was blinded, rather than rely solely on his other senses for input, he developed the ability to generate and manipulate images thereby constructing a very real world inside his mind.

" It is interesting that the visual cut-off point of my accident was not a break in continuity, only a temporary dimming in the clarity of the tract. For a short while there was a dream-like vagueness, but once my visualisation increased, the memory tract became even more robust and coherent than before my accident. The upgraded quality is not hard to explain. My inner vision involves a process of 'active seeing' and this is more enriching than the 'passive immersion in light' for which it substitutes. The latter is the normal, the often lax way we use, or underuse, our sense of sight. As against this, my substitution calls for effort and active brain participation, a creative routine that fills my life.

Rather than depending on input from out there, my thinking hung unanchored in this now charcoal-grey visual space - a screen suspended in fog. I began to project. My sense of disorientation began to be replaced by an inner focus, firmly fixed on what my brain, in lieu of my eyes, was looking at. Hesitant at first, tentative with a dream-like blur, over time this weird mental substitution grew into a formidable source of generative imagination.

Hand in glove with this projective reconquest of 'vision', an inner voice of common sense cautioned me to anchor the new mental magic to validating data from all my remaining senses and later to carefully evaluate second-hand data from trustworthy people. The distinction between fact and fiction became vital, the murky interface of opinion to be carefully assessed."

He has also written The Crucible of Consciousness: A Personal Exploration of the Conscious Mind.

The Line: A Man's Experience; A Son's Quest to Understand
Authors: Arch Flanagan, Martin Flanagan

3 Stars = I liked the book.

This was an interesting approach to the relating of a POW's experiences working on the Burma Railway. The telling of Arch's life is shared by Arch, through his four contributions, and his son's commentary and thoughts on his father's life.

I've read several books by POWs who worked on the Burma Railway. This was not the very best of the lot, but it was still worth reading.

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

(I'm not sure if it is appropriate to post this book, in this group, but I'd like to warn others ... before they waste their time, or money. Admin, if you wish, you can delete this review, and I will totally understand. Thanks.)

1 Star = Lies! Hoax! Yuck! I wish I hadn't wasted my time reading it.


Forbidden Love: A Harrowing True Story of Love and Revenge in Jordan
Author: Norma Khouri

This book turns out to be a hoax. I loathe authors who write fiction and then pass it off as nonfiction. So, to say that I didn't like this book would be a huge understatement.

The only reason her book became a best seller, in my humble opinion, was the sensationalism of the topic. If she had sold it as a fiction story, it would have sunk without a trace, 'cause she can't write worth a damn.

The Inside Story of Disgraced Author Norma Khouri
More details have emerged in a story by well-known journalist David Leser, published in The Australian Women's Weekly this month. It is the magazine with the largest circulation in the country: over 600,000. Leser reveals for the first time that Khouri admits that she lied in the writing of her book, Forbidden Love. "Look, I did lie, but I lied for a reason. It wasn't fame and fortune I was after, not at all. It was about the issue [of honour killings]. And I apologise to you for lying. I justified it in my head as the ends justifying the means. I hated lying to anyone about anything."

Khouri Makes Charming and Scary Subject
Norma was in fact, a real estate agent from Chicago, mother of two and on the run from the FBI; not the virgin Jordanian woman campaigning against honour killings, she claimed to be on chat shows all over the world.

There's No Honour in Murder
But it was all a lie, as numerous investigations within Jordan and Chicago, Khouri's true place of residence, revealed. While it was SMH journalist Malcolm Knox who wrote the biting expose, the Arab journalist who first queried the authenticity of the book was Rana Husseini.

Excellent section on her in this book.
Telling Tales: A History of Literary Hoaxes