Survivor Biography

What would you do if you took a picture of your child and saw a bright white glow in her eye? How would you feel if the eye doctor said: “Your child has eye cancer and will need emergency surgery to remove the tumor or one or both eyes?” This audiobook tells the story of a 27-year-old deaf-blind female retinoblastoma cancer survivor through the eyes of the survivor and her mother.

As a young girl growing up in Jamaica, Jozanne Marie's greatest desire was to restore a missing ancestral link and satisfy a longing for the one person she believed could affirm her identity: Her father. He had left for America when she was just an infant. After five years living on the island with an emotionally unavailable mother and a young grandmother (hiding a pocket full of secrets), her father made his triumphant return. He drove up in a white 1980s Volkswagen Beetle, enchanting as a dream. Tragically, her supposed redeemer became her greatest adversary.

As a young political geek, Matt Latimer dreamed of one day heading to Washington to work for a conservative president and usher in another Reagan Revolution. With the support of his slightly mortified liberal parents, he tried to do just that - but his youthful exuberance began to cool as he moved up the rungs of power.

This book is about the life of the author. It focuses on her faith, her hope, and her endurance during the years of her illness. In this true story, you will learn the how and why about the effects that changed her family’s life—the author’s Crohn’s disease, the 14 blood clots, toxic gut syndrome, colitis, tumors, ulcers, vertigo, weight gain and loss, pregnancies, the many surgeries, and how her body would not wake up after some of her surgeries.

Leonore Dvorkin shares her experiences with breast cancer and the fruit of her extensive research on the subject. Her story is presented in factual, but personal manner. On the journey from chilling diagnosis through her decision to undergo a mastectomy, then 10 years of life after the surgery, her story is an uplifting voyage of personal discovery sure to inspire all who listen to it.

Called up in 1940, Reg expected to be fighting Germans. Instead, he found himself caught up in the fall of Singapore to the Japanese. What followed were three years of hell, moving from one camp to another along the Kwai river, building the infamous Burma railway. Reg made the deadly jungle work for him. With an ingenuity that is astonishing, he trapped and ate lizards, harvested pumpkins from the canteen rubbish heap and with his homemade razor became camp barber.

Stowed away on top of a train, twenty-year-old Wim Aloserij escapes the obligatory work camps in Nazi-ruled Germany in 1943. The young man from Amsterdam then goes into hiding on a farm—sleeping for months in a wooden chest hidden underground. But it's not to last. In the cover of night, Wim is captured during a raid and transported to the infamous Gestapo prison in Amsterdam. There, his life changes forever as he is thrown into the nightmare of the Holocaust and transported to Camp Amersfoort—the first of three concentration camps he must endure.

On New Year's Eve 2019, Rafael Behr had what is clinically known as a massive bloody heart attack. In part, it was the result of his compulsive relationship with politics, working as a journalist in Westminster, on the front line of bitter information wars. When he was discharged from hospital, he asked himself how he would ever re-engage with politics—how would he care enough to write about it—without the stress? Something had to change. In 2021, Rafael published an essay about that experience and some of the lessons he had learned.

When Brother Nathan was a child in Egypt, he witnessed the unthinkable - his own father's murder at the hands of terrorists. At first he struggled with his powerful urge to seek revenge against his father's assassins. Today he ministers in the very village where his father was killed as well as in countless other cities and villages across Egypt and throughout the Middle East.

What is the most baffling period in our lives? Not childhood, not old age, but the decades of our 40s and 50s, the period now generously known as middle age. It's both an occasion for regret and an opportunity for coming to terms, the moment when we come up against our limits and discover, for better and worse, who we are.

Gidon Lev, an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor, has lived an extraordinary life. At the age of six, he was imprisoned in the concentration camp of Theresienstadt. Liberated when he was ten, he lost at least 26 members of his family, including his father and grandfather. But Gidon’s life is extraordinary not only because he is one of the few living survivors remaining but because of his lessons learned over nearly a century. His enduring message is of hope and opportunity – to make things better.

My life has been full of unrequested lessons. Some traumatic. Others can be described as torturous. But I have always learned something of value. I am a survivor. "Angst to Ascension" is part of my story, in poetic form. I say 'part' of my story because my story is still being written. But, no matter what life brings my way, I promise to keep surviving and learning. I will continue my ascension.

Dear Kobe is horrific, tragic, inspirational, and miraculous. It stands as an important reminder of how precious freedom is and how carefully it should be guarded.

Robert was a young man struggling to make it on his own when in 1990, he suffered a violent and traumatic experience when someone put a bullet through his brain. Robert tells the amazing story of survival during a time when life shriveled to dark emptiness and his future seemed hopeless.

Atta Ahmad was determined to make his dreams come true. So unwavering, in fact, that he was willing to forgo sleep just to reach his goals. Eventually, it caught up to him on September 5, 2015. That fateful day, an exhilarating road trip from Boston to Michigan turned into a fight for his life when his exhaustion drove him to fall asleep at the wheel.

For more than 30 years, Phillip Maisel has worked selflessly to record the harrowing stories of Holocaust survivors. Volunteering at Melbourne's Jewish Holocaust Centre, Phillip has listened tirelessly to their memories, preserved their voices and proven, time and time again, just how healing storytelling can be. Each testimony of survival is a miracle in itself - earning Phillip the nickname 'the Keeper of Miracles'.

Selma van de Perre was 17 when World War Two began. Until then, being Jewish in the Netherlands had been of no consequence. But by 1941 this simple fact had become a matter of life or death. Several times, Selma avoided being rounded up by the Nazis. Then, in an act of defiance, she joined the Resistance movement, using the pseudonym Margareta van der Kuit. For two years 'Marga' risked it all.

Georgiana White isn’t a self-help guru or spiritual leader. She doesn’t have a degree in psychology, nor is she a licensed therapist. But, she is an expert in survival. In Whispers of Hope, she narrates her story, a story of hope and resilience of the human spirit. Beginning in her childhood and continuing through the years, White shares the lessons she’s learned during her journey as she unravels the memories of trauma.

In this captivating audiobook on resilience, Ria walks you through her own horrific story of more than seven years of sexual abuse by her father. She then shares how she learned not only to survive, but also to thrive in spite of her past. Learn how to overcome challenges, obstacles, and adversity in your own life by building a bridge out of the past and into the future.

Have you ever been told that you can’t do something, even if that something is your dream? Mohammed Yousuf’s Ascending Adversity will prove to you that you can.