Freedom Train

The breathtaking memoir by a member of "Nicky's family", a group of 669 Czechoslovakian children who escaped the Holocaust through Sir Nicholas Winton's Kindertransport project. My Train to Freedom relates the trials and achievements of award-winning humanitarian and former Episcopal priest Ivan Backer.

When the Russians invade Lithuania, Zofia and her brother Jacek fear for their lives. As a journalist, Jacek is targeted by the new communist regime, which despises intellectuals and condemns them to hard labor in the gulags, where few survive. Hearing rumors that the Japanese consul Sugihara might offer them exit visas, Zofia knows she must seize this chance for freedom. In return, Sugihara asks them to deliver a parcel to Tokyo—an innocuous request, until they discover it contains intelligence about Nazi atrocities that the Nazis are desperate to retrieve.

After a childhood marked by neglect, poverty, and periods of homelessness, with a mother who believed herself to be the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary, Carrot Quinn moved out on her own. She found a sense of belonging among straight-edge anarchists who taught her how to traverse the country by freight trains, sleep in fields under the stars, and feed herself by foraging in dumpsters. Her new life was one of thrilling adventure and freedom, but still she was haunted by the ghosts of her lonely and traumatic childhood.

Through a lyrical narrative of her journey to Tibet in 2007, activist Canyon Sam contemplates modern history from the perspective of Tibetan women. Traveling on China's new "Sky Train", she celebrates Tibetan New Year with the Lhasa family whom she'd befriended decades earlier and concludes an oral-history project with women elders.

Our Christian Wagon Train of Freedom: Christ has Set Us Free on the Oregon Trail, is the story of Maria, who travels along the Oregon Trail with her sister to meet Levi, her future husband and a rancher in California. Managing to survive the tests that a wagon train can give to a young woman unused to manual labor, she arrives at Levi's ranch with a surprise. A few family slaves accompany her and Levi tells her clearly that they won't be slaves on his ranch.

A man, out for prayers, is found dead by a river bank and the listener is off to the races in this relentlessly paced twentieth century chronicle. Strong female characters like the coprotagonist, contrast the story to its provocative title, who is a strong, independent woman who would stop at nothing to achieve what she believes in. Human irrationality is front and center in this historical fiction theater.