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| Image credit: Penguin Books Australia |
So this week, I decided to take a break from the fiction and fantasy and
classic literature and delve into something a little more modern and relevant.
Having bought this book over a year ago, I figured now was a perfect time to
read it, considering all that’s currently going on.
This week’s book was Leigh Sales’ Any
Ordinary Day.
A gorgeous work of non-fiction, Any
Ordinary Day sees journalist and 7:30
host Leigh Sales tackle the most tremendous and hardest of questions to answer:
what happens after the worst day of your life? Leigh crunches numbers and
contemplates the stories of a handful of people who have seen/been the victim
of great trauma, asking them what it was like before, during, and after this
one event that changed their lives.
Amongst stirring tales of resilience, horrible blindsides, and
frightening close-to-home traumatic events, Leigh discovers the causes and functional
reasoning behind our actions, words, and experience before, during, and after
times of great stress, trauma, and grief.
She pads out each chapter with a satisfactory blend of stories and
academic facts, making it a very informative piece of non-fiction that is also
engaging and emotionally stirring.
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| Image credit: Disrupted Festival |
One would think that such content as the Lindt Café Siege, familial
homicide, freak accidents, and degenerative illness would be a rather
dispiriting and depressing reading experience, but somehow Leigh manages to
leave her readers at the end of each chapter with an uplifted feeling rather
than bone-crushing melancholia.
While the book certainly does not set out to be like a media puff piece about the enduring spirit of humanity, a fair part of those feels are
unavoidable as Leigh chronicles very sweet and down-to-earth interviews that
take away the media furore of these highly-covered news events and brings
reality closer to home, each one closing on messages about the awesome power of
communication, love, laughter, and human kindness.
It’s a gorgeous read!
Author: Leigh Sales, 2018
Published: Penguin Random House
Australia Pty. Ltd. 2018
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