The Elysium Project: Destiny Quest Snapshots

Snapshots: Memories and Recipes by Sandra Martin is an autobiography that offers up more than facts. It presents a life view, entertaining and insightful vignettes, and recipes that are distilled from Martin's experiences. In Snapshots, Martin describes a life of hard work mixed with moments of good luck, great successes and great disappointments.

It's an engaging, descriptive narrative told in a series of stories that takes you from a farm in Virginia, to New York, to Cairo and back again, with plenty of stops along the way.

Sandra describes how, chutzpah combined with happenstance, she became a New York book agent specializing in spiritual and paranormal topics, and a PBS producer. She takes us along on her dinner meetings with fascinating writers and to retreats out west, where she learns what she will and will not do on her quest. In the end she has found wonderful ways to share her knowledge as she continues to learn and grow. Each story is capped with a tasty recipe that relates to the places or people in the story. The fact that they are all thirty minute recipes made with easy to acquire ingredients makes it even better.

With a Christian base and a deep familiarity with Edgar Cayce's teachings, Sandra Martin's spiritual anchor combines with a desire to learn more about her inner self as she progresses through life. Her intelligence, outgoing personality and work ethic has allowed her to build a wonderful life. The people she has met, befriended and worked with, from Bill Moyers, Richard Belzer and Danny Glover, to leaders in research are described in the book. Throughout, Sandra's ability to assess and reassess her actions and reactions not only informs her work in life, but directs her spiritual quest and allows her to take risks that, in the long run, bring far more satisfaction and fulfillment than pain. Martin teaches the power of a positive approach to life's events -- negative and positive -- which builds resilience and leads to deeper understanding of the self, the world and, therefore, others.

Review by Patrice Comninel

Larger Than Life Living in the World Today