The thing with resilience, true stories of resilience have been portrayed in many books and films over the years, and we are going to talk about some of those in this course and try to gather up examples from all of you watching the course of your favorite true stories of resilience. This book to destroy you is no loss, is a very powerful story of resilience. This is a biography but it's written like an autobiography. It's the story of Thida Butt Mam a Cambodian woman who when she was a teenager experienced the Holocaust in Cambodia that was perpetrated by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge during the time called The Killing Fields from 1975 to 1979. She told her story to JoAn Criddle, who, and together they created this wonderful account of resilience. In this book, Thida describes her experiences when the Khmer Rouge took over, how it affected her family, many of her friends and relatives were killed. And she was forced to go into a work camp as were many other young adolescents. And she describes the horror and terror of that experience, both threats of death and starvation. And she describes one particular passage, this very powerful where what happened when one of her friends was killed by the Khmer Rouge, she was raped until she died. And this terrified Thida and her friends and they fell into despair that this might happen to them. And then these girls began to carry around poison so that they wouldn't suffer the same fate. But it was a very low time in her life and experience during the killing fields period. Then she has an epiphany. One morning she looks up in the sky as the sun is rising and sees the animals in the rice paddies and her perspective changes. She has this sudden realization that the Khmer Rouge can't control everything. They don't control when the sun rises and falls. And she feels a surge of hope and meaning. And at that time, Thida decides to survive and carry on and regains her hopes for the future. Many of the people who've experienced this kind of horrible disaster or adversity, report these kinds of epiphanies, an epiphany of meaning that gives them hope and the courage to carry on. Thida and many of her family made it to Thailand, escaped from Cambodia, and went on to the United States, where she grew up and became a very successful person and worked with Joan Criddle to create this powerful account of her experience with the Khmer Rouge. There have been many other autobiographies telling stories of resilience. I've listed a few examples here, and what we're going to do is generate a list for reading and reviewing in this course. These are favorites of mine, but there are many others. Maya Angelou wrote multiple autobiographical books about her own life growing up what she's suffered and this is the story of her resilience. Ishmael Beah was a child soldier who wrote this account of his experience both as what happened to him as a boy soldier and then what happened, how he recovered from that experience. Liz Murray was made famous actually by a television film called From Homeless to Harvard and she has published her autobiography since then after she graduated from Harvard. And we're going to talk more about that later on in the course. There are also not only her film, on television, but many other films and documentaries with true stories of resilience, The Lost Boys of Sudan is one of my favorites. And there's a documentary available online called Ida's Story that I think is also a very powerful story of a young girl's life. It chronicles what happened to her in 1918, when the Cossacks invaded Ukraine and she had traumatic experiences then. But she's recounting what happened when she's in her 90s. During this module of the course we also are going to have you watch the story of Michael Maddaus. He's a classic late bloomer. His life story was documented by the PBS special, NOVA special called, This Emotional Life. And there's about a nine minute segment of his story that you're going to watch from that television program. And then we've also had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Maddaus and have a conversation with him with a little bit more detail about his life's story that's on the course site for you to watch. So we want you to nominate books and films, true stories of resilience that you have found very powerful and affected your thinking about resilience. And we'll share that with the course. You'll find instructions on our course site of how to nominate some of your examples.
