An inside look at the experiences of shelter dogs that is sure to appeal to dog and animal lovers.
Upbeat memoir of a dog lover who shares her insights about homeless dogs and animal shelters.
For years, Boston Globe columnist Sutherland (What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage: Lessons for People from Animals and Their Trainers, 2008, etc.) has been a volunteer at Boston’s Animal Rescue League, walking, training, and fostering dogs and matching them with prospective new owners. The titular dog was a fearful, undersocialized dog the author and her husband adopted and struggled mightily (and successfully) to turn into a lovable pet. Sutherland’s account of Penny Jane is just one thread in a narrative that includes anecdotes about dozens of dogs, observations about the practices of various animal shelters, and interviews with their operators and with animal behaviorists. Her understanding of shelter dogs—she writes that they are not so much homeless as humanless—shines through on every page. Readers will relish her account of her mastery of Brody, a “jumpy-mouthy” she fostered, and will learn how a puppy can accidentally be turned into an overexcitable, scary, even dangerous dog by life in a shelter. Sutherland is troubled by the transport of shelter dogs across the country, especially of unwanted Chihuahuas from the West to New England, and she has her reservations about spay and neuter programs, which may reduce numbers of strays but don’t help dogs currently in shelters. Further, she voices her concerns about people who abandon their pets and about prospective owners with unrealistic expectations about their adoptees. Nonetheless, this is still essentially an optimistic book, filled with stories about amazing volunteers at caring shelters and positively generous depictions of quirky, often damaged dogs. An appealing close-up photograph of a shelter dog opens each chapter, enticing readers to head for the nearest animal shelter and bring one home.
An inside look at the experiences of shelter dogs that is sure to appeal to dog and animal lovers.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-237723-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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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