{"product_id":"2940013336094","title":"Liberty's Quest","description":"Liberty Kovacs’ life story has all the elements of the American Dream, both its myth and its reality. Breaking free from the patriarchal rule of her Greek immigrant family, she set an uneasy but independent course that led to her becoming a nurse and marrying fellow Ohioan, the poet James Wright. Headed for the fabled Land of Happiness, Life broke in with all its unpredictable misery: living in Minneapolis with their two sons, the marriage was soon riven by alcoholism, angers, unspeakable trauma and eventually bitter divorce. Bereft but courageous, Liberty set a new course and headed west to San Francisco where she had a scholarship to study psychiatric nursing. A single mother, she experienced triumphs in her profession, married again and bore a third son — that household too fell victim to unhappiness and despairs. Yet with each blow, her spirit rose again and again, never giving up on herself or her sons, whom she writes about with disarming openness. Liberty Kovacs has endured, endures, with what can only be called a spiritual, and maybe American, will. Reading this memoir, we experience her life as an epic quest toward wisdom, learning how to live, as she writes, with love, acceptance and generosity.  —Merrill Leffler, publisher of Dryad Press, author of Partly Pandemonium, Partly Love (poems) and Take Hold\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"In striving for truthfulness and authenticity, Liberty (Eleutheria) Kovacs tells her story with uncompromising and often startling honesty. The structure of her extensive narrative is shaped by paradigms from psychotherapy.  But the mainly introspective nature of her material is balanced by a wealth of evocative details from the world she, family, and neighbors inhabited.\u003cbr\u003e\"Kovacs herself is a clinical therapist who practiced marriage counseling successfully for thirty-five years.  Her story tells what happens to families in trouble and why, especially to second generation immigrant youth when they are caught between the language, culture, religion and politics of the parent generation and the promises, customs and mores of the new civilization in the U.S.  Liberty’s people came from the Dodekanese in Greece.  They brought with them an almost Homeric doctrine of honor as the value above values.  Liberty, victimized by it, fought this doctrine all her life.  Ironically, it also contributed to what is best in her.  No wonder her accounts read like parts of a novel from Tolstoy or scenes from a Greek tragedy.\u003cbr\u003e\"On the surface, all immigrant stories are the same, exuding optimism and happiness:  Move to the U.S., get a good job, find a mate, marry, buy a house, and construct a new identity.  If we are lucky, we prosper and send our children to college or help them to get a start in business.  When we dig below the surface, matters are more complicated and ambiguous because immigrants often bring with them psychic and genetic histories full of incendiary material ready to explode when it comes into friction with the values of the new environment in school, church, work, and community.  As Liberty Kovacs shows, the life of many of the people trapped between the Old Country and the American Dream is decidedly unhappy and often has destructive consequences. But her autobiography is not all dark.  Her account of white-water rafting on the rivers of the West and Southwest, including the Colorado, is poetic and inspiring.  The rivers helped Liberty, as the Irish would say, make her soul.  The fight for freedom, integrity and balance was worth it.\u003cbr\u003e\"Although this book will never furnish the libretto for a Broadway musical, I highly recommend it.  It is a must read for all who have struggled and are struggling with adapting to the stages of life.  But I hope it will also be read and discussed by immigrant groups, members of the medical profession, therapists and their clients, as well as practicing and aspiring writers.  I would have added \"politicians\" to this list, but most of them are not interested in the stark facts of immigrant realities and would rather build fences to keep the rabble out.\" -Franz Schneider, Ph.D., LL.D. \u003cbr\u003eProfessor Emeritus, Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA, English and Comparative Literature","brand":"Reed, Robert D. Publishers","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47147514167536,"sku":"2940013336094","price":9.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940013336094_p0.jpg?v=1763579606","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940013336094","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}