inspired living books

Radical Gratitude

And Other Life Lessons Learned in Siberia

Andrew Bienkowski and Mary Akers

An illuminating melding of narrative and inspiring practical guidance, this is both the extraordinary true story of a family's survival in Stalinist Siberia and a guide to becoming a person who can give to others.

Self help is only the beginning of the journey - to progress, we move beyond this to help others. Andrew Bienkowski learned this as a young Polish boy at the age of five when, exiled with his immediate family, he watched his grandfather starve to death so they could survive. Reminiscent of Viktor Frankel's great classic, Man's Search for Meaning, this extraordinary book moves back and forth from the family's terrible journey of survival in Siberia, to how to become a person who can give to others.

Each chapter details powerful ways to achieve this with such concepts as radical gratitude (being grateful for small gestures instead of seeing them as incomplete), who we can and cannot help, genuine being with others in need, and the remarkable changes that we can experience when we do.

Read an extract from Radical Gratitude.

Reviews

The Buffalo News:
'In the mud hut they called home, the 5-year-old boy watched as his grandfather lay dying on a bed of straw. It wasn’t the harsh Siberian cold or the meager rations that were killing the old man, though they might have. It was, instead, that he decided to starve himself.' Read full review...

Read a review of Radical Gratitude at: http://www.donaldcapone.blogspot.com/
'I found the memoir part of the book, which alternated between third and first person narration, truly fascinating. Bienkowski's family, which consisted of his grandmother and grandfather, mother, younger brother, and himself were forced from their home and relocated to Siberia by Stalin after communist Russia invaded Poland (his father was in the Polish army fighting on another front). Stripped of their belongings and money, they were forced to live in a hut with virtually nothing.'

ISBN:	9781741754223
Australian Price (inc. GST)	$22.95
Format	Paperback
Number of Pages	264
Australian Publication	March 2008
Publisher	Allen & Unwin

Buy Radical Gratitude.

About the authors

Andrew Bienkowski has spent more than 40 years as a clinical therapist. At the age of six, he and his family were forced to leave their Polish homeland for Siberia where his grandfather deliberately starved to death so that the women and children might have enough to eat. The years that followed were harrowing, difficult and magical and influenced his entire life. After Siberia, the family spent a year in an Iranian refugee camp where Andrew nearly died from dysentery, malaria and malnutrition. Three years in Palestine followed, a year in England, before he finally immigrated to America where he went on to earn a Masters in Clinical Psychology and to be a psychotherapist.

Mary Akers has been writing and publishing since 1995. Her fiction, poetry and non-fiction have appeared in a number of international journals and magazines, and her personal essays on parenting and the writing life are forthcoming in various anthologies. She frequently writes fiction that focuses on the intersections between art and science, including such topics as diverse and timely as the environmental movement and the struggle for human rights. Although raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia—which she will always call home—she currently lives in Western New York with her husband and three children.