Journey of Miracles

JOURNEY OF MIRACLES is a travel memoir, describing different countries in different eras. It covers a sixty year period, beginning with 1925 and ending in 1985.

In KALLISTE (the most beautiful), Corsica is lovingly described by the author who, as a small child, lived in a mountainside villa with a panoramic view of the surrounding countryside. HAVEN FOR THE RICH AND TITLED describes the good life in the Monte Carlo of the thirties.

Next, in THE INTERRUPTED JOURNEY, we visit a small village in eastern France, at the eve of World War II, where the author's cousin was both the village pharmacist and a busy archaeologist. As a consequence of the outbreak of the war, his unearthing of a Roman swimming pool and the adjacent villa had to be discontinued.

JOURNEY OF MIRACLES is the author's account of her leaving Occupied France with her family and their journey through Spain to Lisbon, Portugal, to board an American cargo ship for passage to the United States.

In NILE CRUISE we have a detailed itinerary of a six hundred mile archaeological tour of Egypt aboard a flat-bottom, wooden river boat - downstream, with the tide, but against the stream of history

THE ASCENT OF MOUNT ETNA is a demonstration of the author's resolve to fulfill a life-long dream.

A most subjective approach characterizes a trip to Bavaria in THE ROMANTIC ROAD, where the author contrasts the beauty of the landscape with the austerity of the Dachau Memorial Museum - site of the oldest Nazi concentration camp.

A GLIMPSE BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN describes a visit to Hungary and Czechoslovakia. In Prague, the author watched an anti-American (dubbed as anti-imperialist) program on state-run television. The following day she witnessed an orchestrated street demonstration.

SACRED COWS AND MOGHUL PALACES is much in the form of an essay, contrasting Hindu customs and architecture with the majestic buildings of the sixteenth century Islamic rulers of India.

Yvonne Wests JOURNEY OF MIRACLES,A TRAVEL MEMOIR (101 pp.,Xlibris) takes the reader through one of the two most interesting periods of U.S. history: World War II and its unsettling prelude. Since her family was living in Corsica and Paris, she was in the middle of the drama when the family had to negotiate its way to Spain and then to the U.S.

For example, one chapter opens with, "In 1938, during the Munich Scare, when Hitler forced Czechoslovakia to give up the Sudetenland, my sister Caroline and I were sent from Paris to my mothers east-country cousin, who lived in a

small French village, safe from air raids and poison gas."

She pens excellent word pictures of such people as her cousin, Tonton Do, the village pharmacist: "He wore a long, white coat over his trousers and

waistcoat and always carried a gold watch and chain in his waistcoat pocket. His hobby, though, was archaeology, abetted by an extraordinary power of divination, as you will see."

In another section, the memoir ...