A tender, heartfelt story.
A 20-something’s memoir about the English mastiff that became her “best friend [and] so much more.”
Watt was a college sophomore when her mother took her to shop for a dog. Though “we promised ourselves we were just going to look,” by the time they drove home, they had bought an English mastiff puppy the author named Gizelle. She knew that the dog was intended to partially make up for her mother’s alcoholism, but she could not stop herself from falling in love with Gizelle, nor could she stop hoping that the dog was a sign that her “best friend” of a mother would finally get sober. Watt eventually took the dog to live with her while she attended the University of Tennessee, where Gizelle became her 160-pound running partner and protector. At 23, the desire to live in a place that was more “energetic, gritty [and] cosmopolitan” took Watt from Knoxville to Manhattan. After securing a small apartment, she took in Gizelle, whose size earned her names like “Cujo” and “Godzilla.” Watt then began working her way up from waitress to public relations assistant and found companionship with a good but dull man who never offered the same emotional satisfaction as Gizelle. As she watched her mother slip away from her and deeper into addiction, Watt discovered that her dog had bone cancer. Determined to make the remaining days of her canine best friend’s life count, she created a “bucket list” of all the things she wanted to experience with her dog before she died—e.g., riding in a boat together or “watch[ing] the snow fall on the beach.” As much a story about growing up as about letting go of things that cannot be changed, Watt’s book is also a reminder of the profound healing connection that can exist between humans and the pets they love.
A tender, heartfelt story.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2365-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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