#ReadAroundTheWorld #Belarus

This is a fascinating book of womens’ recollections of their wartime service during WW2 in the Soviet Union. Svetlana Alexievich is the first Belarusian author to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. She was born in Ukraine to a Belarusian father and Ukrainian mother and grew up in Belarus. Her book is a detailed collection of many women’s stories, thoughts, feelings and heartaches. She has dedicated herself to writing a history through women’s eyes and words, a story that includes emotions, not just cold facts, conquests and achievements.

I found this an intriguing, readable history that highlighted much for me. The dichotomy between the Soviet belief that women were equal and could be fighter pilots, drive tanks and become army surgeons, and the intrinsic chauvinism of the patriarchy that exists in all political systems is apparent. For me, from a country where we view our politicians with distaste and cynicism, I found the patriotism and nationalism and desire to serve the mother country at all costs almost fanatical. Yet the women were unbelievably brave, heroic and tough and they accomplished extraordinary feats. All the while, many of them carried an unwavering desire to be women, to be feminine, and delighted in any opportunity to style their hair and wear heels. Many of them found war challenging on an emotional level, and shed tears as they either killed or saved lives, yet they still managed to continue their tasks. Sadly when they returned home as decorated war heroes they were often treated with suspicion and contempt by their country and their people. This is a remarkable piece of work that deserves much recognition. ( )

The author gathers stories of the women who served in the Russian military during World War II. It is a collection of short interviews. There is no over all narrative or long view on any one woman. ( )

Another reviewer said this book is mandatory reading, and I agree. Most of us read books or articles that glorify or pillory generals, heroes, and politicians. Almost none speak of the regular people who go out to fight. Some are soldiers. Others are volunteers.

And this is the first book that brings together the voices and stories of women who fought and served. The book tells their stories and their voices will haunt you. ( )

More than just stories ( )

DNF @ p157. As an academic exercise I'm sure this is very worthwhile - documenting the experiences of Russian women on the front line in WWII - but with no real narrative or analysis it just becomes a wearying repetition of "blood, horror, death" without any real context. ( )

„Megpróbálom a nagy történelmet emberléptékűvé kicsinyíteni, hogy valamit is megértsek. Megleljem a szavakat. De ezen a látszólag kicsiny és könnyen áttekinthető terepen – az emberi lélekben – még érthetetlenebb, még kevésbé megjósolható minden, mint a történelemben. Azért, mert valós könnyekkel, érzésekkel kerülök szembe. Valós emberi arccal, amelyen beszélgetés közben végigsuhannak a fájdalom és rettenet árnyai. Néha még meg is kísért az eretnek sejtés az emberi szenvedés alig felfogható szépségéről. Ilyenkor megrémülök magamtól.” (228. oldal)

Az első ötven oldal páros lábbal ugrik bele az emberbe. A többi pedig nyitva tartja a sebet. Alekszijevics nagy író, aki a más mondataival ír, de úgy, hogy végig érezni a jelenlétét a szavak mögött. Pedig riportalanyai gyakran érezhetően mítoszt teremtenek, foszlányokból összeeszkábált emlékképeket adnak el koherens valóság gyanánt, elhallgatnak, sőt: egyesek bizonyosan fabulálnak is. De ezzel is érzéseikről tanúskodnak, arról a vágyukról, hogy valami értelmet leljenek abban, amiben (ezt Alekszijeviccsel együtt hiszem) nincsen értelem – így egy monumentális kollázs részeként ők is segítenek, hogy közelebb jussunk az igazsághoz: hogy felismerjük bennük az embert. Ezeket a nőket arra nevelték, hogy nőként viselkedjenek, női szerepeket töltsenek be, női vágyaik legyenek, de egyszeriben egy olyan világban találják magukat, amire nem lehet felkészülni. Ez a világ (a háború) mindenkinek idegen, de a nők szemével nézve még erősebb a kontraszt. Nem az ő háborújuk – ha már valakié, akkor a politikusoké, akik ekkoriban szinte kivétel nélkül férfiak („karaktergyilkos szakma”, ahogy valaki mondta volt). Ha van értelme az egésznek, az az, hogy megmutatják, kilépve a nekik rendelt szerepekből is helyt tudnak állni. És ezt nem lehet visszacsinálni.

Ez a könyv irgalmatlanul közel hozza a háborút. Olyan közel, hogy émelyegni kell tőle – a vértől éppúgy, mint a hazugságoktól. Aki pedig ezektől nincs hányingere, az alighanem bolond vagy senkiházi. ( )

Just read it.

http://www.susanhatedliterature.net/2018/02/the-unwomanly-face-of-war/ ( )

"There can't be one heart for hatred and another for love. We only have one, and I always thought about how to save my heart" ( )

The book gives women the right to speak, let them tell stories about life in war, from teenage girls who grew up in war time , to the stories of girls with romantic but also tragic love, to the tearful tales of mothers, to the mother who has to kill her child. The private0 life of them shown on the page, not only denounce war crimes but also show a strong feminist vibe, when giving women the right to speak, to become the main character. No longer women in the rear waiting for their lovers, husbands returning of war, these are the stories of women at the front of the front line.

The book is like a collection of puzzle pieces, through interviews that female veterans, in the form of monologues, are able to reveal all of their experiences of post-war memories. The book is a valuable contribution, to the stream of post-traumatic, where researchers can not only focus on the obsessive, indeligible links the battle brings. The permanent wounds that cannot be cured even when the war is over. More importantly, the voices from this memory point out an inviolable truth, that is while the war seems to erase the "feminine" from their appearance: women have to cut their braids, they must wear pants, cannot sing or put on makeup, even lose the menstrual cycle, the war cannot kill their desire of being a woman which showed in their drawing eyebrows or putting flowers on head.

War's unwomanly face is 200 stories of love, mourning, war, death, sacrifice, suffering. They pulled together, grouped together, forming a large array, like a wall of martyrs' names, like a wall of faces of memorials. They gradually erase their faces, all their identities and names. But they will never be forgotten.

This book left me a feeling of sadness, but not hopeless. My grandma is a veteran herself. But she never told me what happened to her in the war. After reading this book, I understand why, it's too painful to remember and to tell, so forget it sometimes is better. On Veteran's Day, I will give her this book and a veteran tshirt as a gift. I hope this book will show her how much I'm grateful for what she experienced and my love for her. ( )

It's easy, when we are all preoccupied by Covid-19, to forget that there are significant events occurring in other places in the world. We see brief reports about a disaster in Beirut or wildfires in the US but there hasn't been much attention paid to events in Belarus. Truth be told, most of us probably don't even know where it is. One of the old Soviet Republics, it's a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered by Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. Its capital and most populous city is Minsk. Its president is a relic of the old soviet empire, he's been in power since 1994, and there have been riots in the streets since the last election which is widely recognised to have been rigged.

Ominously, the author of a book I'm currently reading, the Nobel Prize winning author Svetlana Alexievich, is one of those being targetted by the security forces. She is one of the seven members of the Presidium of Coordination Council formed by the opposition movement. It appears all other members of the Presidium have been arrested or banished. She too has been harassed and intimidated.

Having previously read Secondhand Time, I'm only too well aware of how Alexievich has brought the suppressed voices of the Soviet past into the light of day, and it's only too obvious why the authorities would want to intimidate her into silence.

The Unwomanly Face of War shows us how Alexievich has made it her life's work to speak up for voices that have been silenced.

When women speak, they have nothing or almost nothing of what we are used to reading and hearing about: How certain people heroically killed other people and won. Or lost. What equipment there was and which generals. Women's stories are different and about different things. "Women's" war has its own colours, its own smells, its own lighting and its own range of feelings. Its own words. There are no heroes and incredible feats, there are simply people doing inhumanly human things. [...]

Why, having stood up for and held their own place in an absolutely male world, have women not stood up for their history? Their words and feelings? They did not believe themselves. A whole world is hidden from us. Their war remains unknown.

I want to write the history of that war. A women's history. (p.xvi)

Living through these tumultuous times in Belarus, Alexievich will again be watching and listening.

I write not about war, but about human beings in war. I write not the history of a war, but the history of feelings. I am a historian of the soul. On the one hand I examine specific human beings, living in a specific time and taking part in specific events, and on the other hand I have to discern the eternally human in them. The tremor of eternity. That which is in human beings at all time. (p. xxi)

In The Unwomanly Face of War, the focus is not on military progress or tactics, but on the phenomenon of women — some of them as young as sixteen and only five feet tall — feeling the call to protect their homeland. Some went with their parents' blessing, some without. Some feared their own reactions to warfare and learned, suddenly, to hate when they saw what the Germans had done; one wept when she found herself unable to hate a wounded German soldier.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/09/27/the-unwomanly-face-of-war-by-svetlana-alexie... ( )

One of the most striking things I learned from this book is that it was the Russians who defeated the Nazis. The won with their bodies and their hearts and minds. The Allies just mopped up the remnants of Hitler's fighting forces. It did not happen as it is portrayed in the West. The Russians paid a huge price for that victory but it truly is theirs and not ours.

I cried many times in this book and you'd have to be dead inside not to cry yourself. You can read here about real sacrifice, real heroines, real heroes and so much suffering it is heartbreaking.

Whatever is or has happened in your life that has tested you would surely pale into nothingness compared to what these women endured. There is nothing nostalgic or romantic here just suffering, death, loss and then abandonment.

So sad but I am so glad that this book exists otherwise these stories would never have come to light.

Thank you Svetlana Alexievich. ( )

The vignettes painstakingly documented on these pages reveal the hidden side of the prism of war.
At times memory, at times confessions, these true accounts finally permit us a view of the past that textbooks overlooked to tell the tales of the battles within the war.
Each story will leave you breathless and pondering ( )

The vignettes painstakingly documented on these pages reveal the hidden side of the prism of war.
At times memory, at times confessions, these true accounts finally permit us a view of the past that textbooks overlooked to tell the tales of the battles within the war.
Each story will leave you breathless and pondering ( )

If you read only one book this year read this! (VII-20) ( )

I feel bad about rating this book 3 stars rather than 5, given the almost unimaginable accounts of suffering and loss contained within its covers. Svetlana Alexievich interviewed dozens of Soviet women veterans of the Second World War and here gives them a voice which they did not have in official government accounts of the conflict. That is the real achievement of The Unwomanly Face of War.

However, while many of the individual accounts are compelling, this book just didn’t work for me as a whole. Alexievich seems interested only in certain kinds of narratives (particularly ones which are rather gender essentialist), though since we get to see little of her methodology in gathering these oral histories, it’s tough to know for sure (and what clues we do get are often framed in language so emotive and heavy-handed as to be mawkish). In many of the interview transcripts provided, it’s clear that the women are responding to questions posed to them by Alexievich—but since those questions aren’t included in the transcripts, it’s difficult to know to what extent Alexievich is shaping/steering the interviews, or to what extent the interviews have been edited by her.

It’s clear that Alexievich did avoid certain hot-button topics to a great extent (perhaps understandably, given that she was conducting these interviews in the late 70s and early 80s), but I found her apparent unwillingness to engage with questions of gender in a book which upfront frames was as “unwomanly” to be frustrating. For a book which is supposed to be about lifting up little-heard voices, it seems oddly interested in reinforcing conventional wisdom. ( )

The books of Alexievich are great but painful readings. In this one, using the usual interview format, she`s telling about the lives of the female soviet participants of WWII. Sometimes cruel, sometimes touching but unputdownable all the time. ( )

Remembering is not a passionate or dispassionate retelling of a reality that is no more, but a new birth of the past, when time goes in reverse. Above all it is creativity. As they narrate, people create, they "write" their life.

It is truly amazing how Alexievich has created her own distinct polyphonic style of historical non-fiction, this hauntingly beautiful mix of facts and feelings, challenging traditional ideas of what history is and how it should be remembered and recorded.

Here, she presents a more rounded picture of the roles that Russian women had held in WWII, young idealistic women - some still girls - who fought for their country as snipers, sappers, nurses, launderers, underground partisans, and more. It offers a complementary counterpoint to the oft-told stories of idealistic young men who joins the fight due to patriotism or for the sense of adventure or even under the false impression of the invincibility of youth, and end up disillusioned by the senselessness and horror of the daily war they witness then and afterwards. The book itself places the women and their stories as the focus, and in doing so, makes it more than about the war, but also about that very specific Russian ideal, that strong bond to the Motherland and the ingrained belief in self-sacrifice for the greater good, and Russian history that produced it.

Near the end, Alexievich touches on what could be a fascinating standalone topic for another book, the dark aftermath of Victory: how to rebuild lives that have been put on hold for years after such a life-changing event; the constant reminders of the war - in hidden unexploded mines destroying post-Victory lives and morale, the crippled survivors, the PTSD, the destroyed landscape -; the stigma of being a woman at the frontline and the double-standards of people in wartime and peacetime; the continuation of Stalinism that questioned the very survival of decorated heroes and sent them to the gulags.

Truly an important oral history of Russian women in WWII.

Aside: It's difficult to reconcile the enormity of the physical efforts involved in wars with the ideals and abstractions that create and sustain the very same wars. How intense the physical and mental hardships were, made endurable by simple morale boosts, be it letters from home, a clean shirt, or even a soft peal of laughter or music. Somehow an ongoing battle can suddenly cease, all because both sides received words of Victory for one. In the split second before and after the victory/defeat was announced, nothing physical on that battlefield has changed except the whole mentality and yet that's what ultimately decides wars. And what about the aftermath of these wars. The horrors can be glossed over with clinical accounts of major and decisive battles, the dead collectively memorialised as brave statistics, and the survivors' entire wartime experiences reduced to little medals. ( )

Éste fue mi libro de cabecera durante todas las vacaciones de verano. El año pasado leí Voces de Chernóbil, y me pareció una obra maestra. Hoy termino de leer La guerra no tiene rostro de mujer, y no creo poder elegir entre ninguna de las dos obras. Svetlana es una maestra del retrato humano, una historiadora del alma humana. Todas las historias de este volumen tienen la voz sencilla de la oralidad, y la potencia narrativa del mejor de los cuentistas. Cuando, dentro de muchos años, se hable de los clásicos de mi tiempo, espero que se hable de Sveltana Alexievich. ( )

A whole lot of war stories from the points of view of some of the million frontline female Soviet World War 2 veterans. Many of the stories brought tears to my eyes. ( )

The book I read was the edition entitled "The Unwomanly Face of War". I can find it in the database but can't get it to enter here. I'm assuming it's the same book in a different edition.

This was an incredibly difficult read, both because of the subject matter and because of the way it's put together. As an "oral history" it really has no arc and no cohesion. The women's stories are told in very brief paragraphs, in the kind of choppy language that is true to the spoken word but which doesn't flow the way fictional dialogue does. Their stories are disjointed, often repetitive, and always searing.
( )

A book of anecdotes from varied Women from different backgrounds all fighting in their own unique way for the "Motherland", doctors, nurses, engineers, gunners and even snipers, and in the majority of cases without being supplied with even the most basic of needs. They tell of life before during and after the second World War, some in a few lines others several pages.
Gripping informative moving and at times difficult to read, stories of hardship hunger horror loss love but above all heroism.
An absorbing gripping quality read. ( )

DNF @ 16%

This just wasn't what I was expecting. It's just a bunch of snippets of women telling their war stories without any kind of overarching narrative or background. Not a bad book in itself, but I'm not interested in reading 300 pages of this. ( )

Memories of World War II by Soviet female veterans. A typical (but very good) history of the war like Max Hastings’ Inferno covers different levels: high level national politics, military strategy, statistics to contextualize the scope, descriptions of battles and weapons, along with scattered anecdotes to bring the history down to human scale. The anecdotes will focus primarily on combat as experienced by male officers and soldiers. Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate does the Russian face of the war from top to bottom, but fiction allows him to imagine the history of the war entirely from the perspective of the participants (and its victims): General Zhukov, Moscow intellectuals, tank commanders, partisans, persecuted Jews. Both male and female have roles to play.

Svetlana Alexievich’s work is somewhere between history and fiction. A work of “non-fiction,” it weaves together the memories of Soviet female participants in what the Soviets called the Great Patriotic War. Alexievich is like Penelope weaving a tapestry of recollections that originate in actual events but are transformed as memory-stories, not of the deeds of men, but by women in their old age. Researched in the 1980’s, most of the narrators have probably passed on by now.

The book, even more than her Voices from Chernobyl, affected me emotionally, very much. Strategy, combat, weapons, statistics, context are pretty much ignored. It is probably the author’s thesis that the women’s memories emphasize emotions; emotions are the content of their memories, and these emotions rarely touch on the emotions associated with battles and combat. If you empathize with these emotions you are likely to have insight into some of the emotions of men as well.

The actual combat work is described matter-of-factly. An unusually detailed story in Alexievich’s collection – even my summary has to omit some of the anecdotes -- is told by Appolina Nikonovna Litskevich-Bairak, 2nd lieutenant, commander of a sapper-miner platoon. Sappers were assigned the harrowing job of disarming mines and IEDs. Probably in her 60s when her memories were recorded, the youthful tone of her voice is unusual. Brief anecdotes about her childhood – she was originally from Siberia. She’s punished during training and ordered to clean the floors of the barracks – she explains the best way to polish floors: “I’ll explain at once … In detail… […] After lights out you take your boots off, so you don’t muck them up with mastic, wrap your feet in pieces of an old overcoat, making a sort of peasant shoe tied with string. […] You have to polish it so it shines like a mirror. [etc.].” Another anecdote about her embarrassment when she saluted with the wrong hand.

Following training, new lieutenant of a platoon at the front. Her troops simply ignore their 20 year old commander; she is forced to give the command “As you were.” And immediately an artillery barrage begins; she dives for a snowbank so she won’t stain her new overcoat in the mud to the amusement of her troops.

The job is described. At night she and a unit commander crawl into a trench in no man’s land. Camouflaged, they observe in the daytime looking for irregularities that may betray newly laid German mines. In freezing cold. Later on, “Before our troops advanced, we worked during the night. We felt the ground inch by inch. Made corridors in the mine fields. All the work was done crawling … On your belly… I shuttled from one unit to another. There were always more of ‘my’ mines.”

Stories: Invited to officers’ breakfast. “When everybody sat down at the kitchen table, I paid attention to the Russian stove with the closed door. I went over and began to examine the door. The officers poked fun at me: ‘You women imagine mines even in pots and pans.’ I joked back and then noticed at the very bottom, to the left of the door, there was a small hole. I looked closer and saw a thin wire going into the stove … ‘The house is mined, I ask you to quit the premises’ … I set to work with the sappers. First we removed the door. Cut the wires with scissors … In the depths of the stove, two big packages wrapped in black paper. About forty pounds of explosives. There’s pots and pans for you … “

Later her sappers get into a fight with artillery troops when one of the artillery troops shouts “Heads up! What a chassis!” She does not understand the cause of the fight until her subcommander has to explain “that the word ‘chassis’ was very offensive for a woman. Something like ‘whore.’ A frontline obscenity …” [Without editorial comment, Alexievich contrasts the initial disrespect from her platoon with her sappers risking court martial to defend her after she has become a combat veteran, not to mention that she is still too green to have mastered the “frontline obscenit[ies].”]

[As the Red Army advances, somewhere in Czechoslovakia or Poland]. “And there were mines at every step. Many mines. Once we went into a house, and someone saw a pair of calfskin boots standing by a wardrobe. He was already reaching out to take them. ‘Don’t you dare touch them!’ I shouted. When I came up and began to study them, they turned out to be mined. There were mined armchairs, chests of drawers, sideboards, dolls, chandeliers … Peasants asked us to de-mine the rows of tomatoes, potatoes, cabbage.”

“Well, so … I went through Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Germany […] Mostly I remember only visual images of the lay of the land. Boulders … Tall grass … Either it was really tall or it only seemed so to us because it was unbelievably difficult to go through it and work with our probes and mine detectors. […] Flowerbeds gone to seed. There were always mines hiding there; the Germans loved flowerbeds.”

In Romania, she’s invited to a dance by a woman friend. “I put on trousers, an army shirt, calfskin boots, and on top of it all the Romanian national costume: a long embroidered linen blouse and a tight checkered skirt. Tied a black belt around my waist, threw a colorful shawl with long fringe over my head. To this should be added that, from crawling in the mountains all summer, I had a dark tan, only blond strands stuck out on my temples, and my nose was peeling – still it was hard to distinguish me from a real Romanian. A Romanian girl. […] When we came, music was already playing, people were dancing. I saw almost all the officers from my battalion. At first I was afraid to be recognized and exposed, and so I sat in a far corner, without attracting attention […] At least I could see everything … From a distance … But after one of our officers invited me several times to dance without recognizing me with my lips and eyebrows painted, I began laughing and having fun. I was having a very good time … I liked to hear that I was beautiful. I heard compliments … I danced and danced …” [Considerably more detail than any of the combat stories. I’m assuming Alexievich isn’t doing too much editorial tilting to make a point about what women remembered.]

“The war ended, but we spent another whole year demining fields, lakes, rivers. […] For the sappers the war ended several years later; they fought longer than anyone else. And what is it to wait for an explosion after the Victory? […] Death after the Victory was the most terrible. A double death.”

She was demobilized in 1946. “On the train I developed a high fever. My face was swollen; I couldn’t open my mouth. My wisdom teeth were growing … I was returning from the war …” By the end of the war she still hadn’t achieved physical maturity.

Memories by other veterans that struck me:

A city girl who worked on a collective farm substituting for the men who left for the war. “And if I was in any way different from the farm girls, it was only in that I knew many poems and could recite them by heart all the long way home from the fields.”

A sergeant in a communication unit. “We slept on branches or on hay. But I had a pair of earrings stashed away; I’d put them on at night and slept with them.”

A medical assistant. “In the end only one fear remains – of being ugly after death. A woman’s fear … Not to be torn to pieces by a shell … I saw it happen … I picked up those pieces.”

A scout. “A whole clearing covered with blue flowers … To perish among such flowers! To lie there … I was a silly goose, seventeen years old … That’s how I imagined death … “

A pilot. “We didn’t have those women’s things … Periods … You know … And after the war not all of us could have children.”

Sergeant major, a medical assistant, infantry. “I never waited for the attack to be over, I crawled around during the combat picking up the wounded. […] I wished for just one thing – to live until my birthday, so as to turn eighteen. […] I got as far as Berlin. I put my signature on the Reichstag: ‘I, Sofya Kuntsevich, came here to kill war.”

A woman whose name was suppressed. “I became a sniper. I could have been a radio operator. […] But they told me they needed people to shoot, so I shot. I did it well. I have two Orders of Glory and four medals. For three years of war. […] How did the Motherland meet us? I can’t speak without sobbing … It was forty years ago, but my cheeks still burn. The men said nothing, but the women … They shouted at us, ‘We know what you did there! You lured our men with your young c----! Army whores … Military bitches’ They insulted us in all possible ways … The Russian vocabulary is rich ...” But she gets married a year after the war. “I have two children … A boy and a girl. First I had a boy. A good, intelligent boy. But the girl … My girl … She began to walk when she was five, said her first word, ‘mama,’ at seven. […] She’s been in an insane asylum … For forty years. Since I retired, I go there every day. It’s my sin […] I’ve been punished … For what? Maybe for having killed people? I sometimes think so […] I don’t have a grudge against my husband, I forgave him long ago. The girl was born … He looked at us … He stayed for a while and left. Left with a reproach: ‘Would a normal woman have gone to war? Learned to shoot? That’s why you’re unable to give birth to a normal child. […] Maybe he’s right? I sometimes think so … it’s my sin […] To my girl … To her alone … I recall the war, and she thinks I’m telling her fairy tales. Children’s fairy tales. Scary children’s fairy tales … “ ( )

Eindelijk heeft de Tweede Wereldoorlog toch ook een vrouwengezicht gekregen, en dat dankzij Alexijevitch. Mijn waardering kan misschien aan de lage kant lijken, maar dit is in elk geval een heel interessant, goed opgebouwd boek met tal van gruwelijke en vertederende getuigenissen. Een documentair boek dus, geen literatuur, als is de auteur natuurlijk duidelijk aanwezig in het schetsen van de context en in het duiden van de emoties waarmee de getuigenissen werden aangebracht. Een prachtig en ook typerend geval van Oral History. ( )

There is not feminine about war. It brings out the worse and the best of people. Author Alexievich gathers unique war stories of Soviet woman who fought on the front line in all sorts of capacities during World War 2. One memory may only be a paragraph long while other several pages. Their experiences are not belittled or downplayed. The women reached into their memories to describe battlefield conditions, suffering, and death. Memories they were not either allowed to or encouraged not to speak of once the war ended. While this book will help end doubts on whether women can serve on the front lines of battle, it clearly shows that the ability to serve regardless of gender comes down to individual commitment.

I received this book through a Goodreads giveaway. Although encouraged, I was under no obligation to write a review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. ( )