A thoughtful, odd, amusing (albeit occasionally precious) fusion of memoir, career guide, and anarchist screed with built-in...
A snarky idealist’s journey to maturity through pet care.
In his debut, Stephens fuses urban history, social theory, and personal narrative with a wry overview of the ubiquitous phenomenon of dog-walking. He argues that dog walkers represent “features of urban (and, more and more, suburban) life. Conspicuous consumption. The quaint priorities of aging Gen-Xers who have begun to hire millenials.” Stephens seems an appropriate ambassador for this archetypical slacker’s profession: a hyperrebellious Navy brat, he became a self-identified anarchist during the first Iraq war, questioning dominant narratives and enjoying shock appeal, qualities which inform the prose here. Stephens transitioned naturally into the profession following a string of radical adventures, including time with the Zapatistas in Mexico and a protest-related federal conviction. “My life,” he writes, “was a headlong dive into coupling moral outrage with punk rock irreverence.” Having moved to Washington, D.C., for its leftist punk scene (Stephens acutely portrays the city’s social striations), he found himself traipsing through the homes of governmental officials and other high achievers, spending time with their pampered pooches. The book is casually structured, with some chapters tying in the ideas of radical theorists and others providing irreverent looks at the trade, ranging from the pet care industry’s shady finances and hiring practices to the messy realities of time spent with dogs. “Yes,” he writes. “Dog walkers deal with shit…this preoccupies everyone but the dog walkers doing it.” Stephens, who retired after founding a successful dog-walking cooperative, argues that dog-walking is the ideal occupation for both avoiding the 9-to-5 grind and developing a philosophical view of the world: “Walking confers real time for asking questions, in a manner most activities do not.” He constantly examines his encounters through an anarchist lens of social consciousness, noting that the responsibility with which the wealthy entrust their dog-walkers “is highly mediated by race and class.”
A thoughtful, odd, amusing (albeit occasionally precious) fusion of memoir, career guide, and anarchist screed with built-in appeal for millennials.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61219-451-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2015
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
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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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