A rich, moving story of the link between a street-wise cat and a man who earns his living on the streets—perfect for cat...
How a cat helped one man on the road to recovery from drugs.
"I was a failed musician and recovering drug addict living a hand-to-mouth existence in sheltered accommodation,” writes London street musician Bowen. “Taking responsibility for myself was hard enough.” So when a mangy, unneutered tomcat with a festering sore on his leg hung around his apartment building several days in a row, it was with some trepidation that the author invited the cat, whom he named Bob, into his home. Little did Bowen know that this simple act of kindness would create such a bond between them. Earning his living as a street musician in London's Covent Garden, Bowen had to busk on a daily basis to survive. The added responsibility of an injured cat prompted the author to play more frequently and for longer hours; it was only when Bob came with him to Covent Garden that Bowen realized their relationship had deepened into a true friendship. The oddity of seeing a handsome ginger cat curled into a guitar case caused people to stop and chat, take pictures and give more generously than they had in the past. Bowen moved from being a street bum to someone people recognized and wanted to talk to, and Bob was given all sorts of handmade clothes, treats and toys. The author describes delightful moments spent with Bob as well as a harrowing instance when the cat streaked off into the city streets after being threatened by a dog. With confidence gained through his ability to earn money and to tend to Bob's needs, Bowen was finally able to kick his drug dependency and make amends with his estranged mother.
A rich, moving story of the link between a street-wise cat and a man who earns his living on the streets—perfect for cat lovers.Pub Date: July 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-02946-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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