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HomeShop at BookSurgeSelf-HelpDeath, Grief, BereavementIn This Hospitable Land: 1940-1944 |
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| Customer Reviews: | | Average Customer Review: ( 2 customer reviews )
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4 of 4 found the following review helpful:
When the Birds Stopped Singing - Escaping the Gestapo and the Holocaust During World War II Oct 29, 2010
By Peter Buhler, Weston, MA
What would you do if the comfortable routines of your daily life were suddenly taken from you? If cheerful songs of birds in the park were silenced by the roar of approaching airplanes, and then everything else was drowned out by the screams of falling bombs and the concussions of their explosions?
Lynmar Brock's novel, "In This Hospitable Land," tells how two Belgian families answered this question in 1940 when the Germans invaded France and the Low Countries. It is a true and inspiring story, but the principal characters were given fictional names because of continuing sensitivity to those events even sixty years later.
Mr. Brock, a Philadelphia businessman, learned of the story when he married one of the characters, who had lived through the events as a young child and who had immigrated to the United States with her family in the years after World War II. Realizing the importance of the story, and with his wife's assistance, he interviewed, over a 10-year period, family members and members of the French communities in which they sought refuge.
The result is a powerful tale of foresight and preparation, fast reactions to events, courage and endurance, family love, new and sometimes primitive skills they had to learn, the kindness of strangers who took them in and protected them - and the contributions they made in return to those communities and to the French Resistance. It is also about evil and brutality, fractured communities as people were forced to choose sides and the questons and choices the two families faced when everything changed in one day and they realized that nothing would ever be the same.
I found this book to be a page-turner, superbly written, with suspense, drama and vivid descriptions of the events and the human qualities brought out as they struggled to survive during those years of horrible conflict.
At a time when many people are thinking seriously about what it means to be an American, this book is not only a great read, but a stark reminder of the blessings we all enjoy. Too often, we take such blessings for granted without much thought of what the loss of them would mean. Readers of this book won't make that mistake.
3 of 6 found the following review helpful:
In This Hospitable Land Jan 19, 2009
By Lynmar Brock, Jr.
An engrossing and gripping story of a family surviving the horrors of the Second World War escaping into the south of France. It keeps your attention with the challenges to both farm to live and then to have to go into the Resistance when the Gestapo comes looking for the family. The brave Protestants of the region put their own lives at risk to save the family. A wonderful and satisfying read.
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