Reviews for Dreams to Reality: Help for Young Moms, Education, Career, and Life Choices

The average rating for Dreams to Reality: Help for Young Moms, Education, Career, and Life Choices based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-04-10 00:00:00 Jeffrey Tobish If I could give six-stars or a 5+ I would. That's how special this book is. It is a difficult one to do justice because it is so many things and all of them wondrous. It is beautiful, rhapsodist and hugely sympathetic yet not sentimental. At its heart it is a celebration of the profusion of life, all manners of life, and it succeeds on every page. Crucially, it is also a meditation on the very concept of landscape and how we view it, explain it and relate to it. Lopez does not deal in superficial so though mesmerizing, it is not an effortless read. It is fact-filled and there are many historical, cultural, scientific and philosophical excursions but what he comments on - and the beauty of his prose! - is so very interesting and informative* you want to take the time to enjoy the brilliance of it while digesting the wisdom of it all. To conclude, here is a quote from his National Book Award acceptance speech: "There is a word in Japanese, if I pronounce it correctly which is kotodama. It means the soul living within the word. And if, again, I understand the principle in Japanese, no distinction is made here between fiction and nonfiction. The same is true among the Eskimo I've been with. (They don't make so much a distinction between fiction and nonfiction but between the authentic and the inauthentic.) They ask of a story whether it helps. Does a story give hope? Does a story edify? Does a story make it possible for people facing the worst things in their lives to conquer those things and go on, by themselves and as a society?" * As an example of this, there is a section that is essentially about nothing but ice; how it forms i.e. first-, second- and multi-year ice, how it breaks up, how sea ice differs from fresh water ice, the thousand different names of ice and what they mean, the beauty of ice bergs, shorefast ice, embayed ice, grease ice, pack ice vs. field ice, flaw leads, the impact of wind and current. It may not sound it but it is absolutely riveting.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-07-31 00:00:00 Gunawan Djoyo I stumbled on this in 2005, in a little bookstore in Heidelberg specializing in used English-language books. I was just trying to refill my reading material for my trip with something at least marginally interesting, but this turned out to be one of the most stunningly gorgeous books I've ever read--Lopez manages to not only see the hidden beauty of the seemingly barren Arctic landscape, but capture and convey its glory through his prose.