Get to Know My Book: The Human Spirit by Carole Eglash-Kosoff – Part I

Today we are honored to be hosting Carole Eglash-Kosoff on her virtual book tour this month with the 1st installment of her 3 day Get to Know My Book series of book excerpts. Get to Know My Book is an ongoing feature between blogs where we post excerpts of an author’s book so that you can get to know the book better, one blog at a time.

Carole Eglash-Kosoff lives and writes in Valley Village, California. She graduated from UCLA and spent her career in business and in teaching. In 2006 her husband, mother, and brother died within a month of one another, causing her to reevaluate her life. She volunteered to work with the American Jewish World Service and was sent to South Africa to teach. She returned there a year later, having met an amazing array of men and women who had devoted their lives during the worst years of apartheid to helping the children, the elderly, and the disabled of the townships. These people cared when no one else did and their efforts continue to this day. It is their stories that needed to be told. They are apartheid’s unheralded heroes and The Human Spirit is their story.

Carole has also completed a historic fiction novel, a pre- and post- Civil War interracial love story set in Louisiana, When Stars Align.

In addition to writing Mrs. Eglash-Kosoff has established the …a better way! Scholarship program, which provides money and mentoring for several worthy local high school students for both their first and second year of college.

All profits from the sale of The Human Spirit will be donated to Ikamva Labantu and other South African charities. The book is available at Amazon, Author House and Barnes & Noble on-line sites as a hardback, paperback and as an e-book.

An avid student of history, Carole Eglash-Kosoff is a native of Wisconsin. After graduating from UCLA, she spent her career in the apparel industry and teaching fashion retail, marketing, and sales at the college level. Her first book is . She has also established the …a better way! Scholarship program, which provides money and mentoring for worthy high school students for both t

You can visit her website at www.whenstarsalign-thebook.com or connect with her at Facebook at www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=553077163.

About the Book:

Apartheid in South Africa has now been gone more than fifteen years but the heroes of their struggle to achieve a Black majority-run democracy are still being revealed. Some individuals toiled publicly, but most worked tirelessly in the shadows to improve the welfare of the Black and Coloured populations that had been so neglected. Nelson Mandela was still in prison; clean water and sanitation barely existed; AIDS was beginning to orphan an entire generation.

Meanwhile a white, Jewish, middle class woman, joined with Tutu, Millie, Ivy, Zora and other concerned Black women, respectfully called Mamas, to help those most in need, often being beaten and arrested by white security police.

This book tells the story of these women and others who have spent their adult lives making South Africa a better place for those who were the country’s most disadvantaged.

Book Excerpt:

A Changing World

The human spirit is that essence of mind and body that allows each of us to exert all of our energies to overcome the worst difficulties of life that we might encounter. One such travail faced by a wide swath of humanity is the denigration of one group of people by another. It is one of the uglier parts of the human personality that has evolved. Children bully those who are smaller or shyer than others. Adults openly abuse those of a different color, a different ethnicity, or those who have a different belief system.

The founders of our country proclaimed that ‘all men are created equal,’ but it was only partially true. In truth it only referred to white Christian males. Slaves were counted as 3/ 5ths of a person and Jews and Asians were excluded as less than undesirable.

The United States fought a bloody Civil War in the mid- nineteenth century to end the practice of men being allowed to own other men as property. But it would take another entire century for our nation to acknowledge the disparity of

opportunity between black and white. A forty-two year old woman, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955. Five years later four black college students tried to get served at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. They were refused.

They and others had begun to oppose a system that was morally corrupt. They believed they had an inherent right to be treated fairly…no better, and no worse. Flames spread across the country and whites joined blacks in a peaceful Civil Rights movement that changed the landscape of our country.

Other countries around the globe faced similar injustices and struggled to overthrow their own national yoke of oppression. On the continent of Africa colonies that had been controlled by European countries for hundreds of years sought their independence, occasionally in peaceful transition, more often

through bloodshed. Ethiopia fought to free itself from Italian East Africa. Angola fought off its Portuguese masters. British- controlled Rhodesia was split into Zimbabwe and Zambia. The Congo gained independence from Belgium, and there were others.

At the southern tip of that continent, however, a prosperous, white dominated government, and an integral member of the British Commonwealth, stood resolute. The Republic of South Africa, the continent’s largest and most developed country, would not be intimidated. Wealthy and exploited by white settlers for nearly two centuries, its four million Afrikaans and British descendents would not sanction any form of equality with the fourteen million Xhosa, Zulu, Bantu and coloreds whose ancestors often dated back millennia. Whites controlled 98% of the nation’s wealth and they were not eager to share it.

In 1948 a newly elected government, controlled by a coalition of ultra right wing parties. established a formal policy of ‘apartheid,’ a separation of the races…a complete political and economic subjugation of the country’s majority. During the forty- five years that followed, the white entrenched minority would become more strident…more violent. And the non-white majority would suffer!

When you awaken each morning with nothing, the smallest most insignificant something can bring a smile. A larger plastic jug in which to carry clean water and make fewer trips to the distant fresh water tap, a little sun to dry the damp floor beneath you, even a warm body to snuggle with at night can help get you

through another day. Food is expensive; jobs are scarce and pay barely enough to survive. We are less than nothing to the whites we met. Drugs, alcohol and sex, readily available, are escapes from hopelessness. There has to be something better.

Slowly a few individuals begin to rise from the ooze of their existence and object to their treatment. They convinced others and a movement began.

But the Republic of South Africa did not magically shake off the yoke of oppression imposed by the policies of apartheid. The government did not gracefully cede its white domination over the country’s black majority because of Nelson Mandela. Nor were its newfound freedoms the singular result of the efforts of Bishop Desmond Tutu or the sudden magnanimity of the country’s

elected President, F.W. De Klerk. These were among the many leaders whose wise judgment and desire to have a bloodless transition we all remember.

What allowed the Republic of South Africa to become the independent, majority controlled and democratic Union of South Africa were the cumulative energies and pressures of its people, those who were imprisoned, those who were killed, and those in the townships and informal settlements who worked without fanfare to improve their lives and the well-being of their children.

These men and women saw the squalor around them…children wandering the dirt streets while their parents looked for food…seniors without heat or a hot meal, the blind, crippled and sick, dying of neglect. And a new scourge, HIV, inflicted large numbers of the population with AIDS leaving hundreds of thousands of children orphaned by parents dead from the disease.

Old and young, black and coloured, economically disadvantaged….these were the most vulnerable!

Caring individuals struggled to organize their communities but their resources were negligible. Government and businesses ignored them but these few weren’t entirely alone. Despite severe prohibitions, white liberals connected with these

caring persons to bring small measures of justice, fairness, and opportunity to better the lives of those who had so little. Together black, white, and coloured men and women worked to set up the basic services that have evolved today as recognized social support networks.

All that can be said at the end of an individual’s life is that he, or she, made a difference and that their family, their community and those they touched, were better for them having lived and given of themselves.

This, then, is a story of important people; individuals who helped bring equality to the land. People who needed to make a difference…men and women you probably never have heard of.

Tomorrow stop off at Literarily Speaking with Get to Know My Book: The Human Spirit by Carole Eglash-Kosoff – Part II!