With Americans owning more dogs than any other country in the world, this sprightly, entertaining travelogue should find a...
Man and dog take to the road.
Hoping to “celebrate the breadth of human-dog relationships in contemporary life,” journalist Denizet-Lewis (Writing and Publishing/Emerson Coll.; American Voyeur: Dispatches from the Far Reaches of Modern Life, 2010, etc.) chronicles a four-month trip with his Labrador mix, Casey. In a small RV, the two traveled from Provincetown, Rhode Island, to Florida, across the South, through the Midwest to California and back. Along the way, Denizet-Lewis met show dogs and strays, police dogs and pampered pets, and he visited with dog rescuers, trainers, groomers, whisperers, masseurs, photographers and healers. He talked with people suffering from cynophobia (fear of dogs) and others who claimed they could communicate with dogs and translate their messages to humans. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the author visited with dog-loving writer Amy Hempel, who advocates for shelter dogs and pit bulls, which are rarely adopted. Shelter workers tell him that black dogs, also, are hard to place. “Many people subconsciously overlook them,” one shelter worker told Denizet-Lewis, a phenomenon she calls Black Dog Syndrome. The author’s saddest encounter with dogs occurred on a Navajo reservation, where strays abound, and teenagers run over dogs just for sport. From there, Denizet-Lewis left with a new companion, whom he named Rezzy. In North Carolina, he met Rob, an owner of wolfdogs, a combination of wolf and, in this case, Husky. Rob told him that wolves “are shy and misunderstood,” “independent” and “smart as hell,” although they are not affectionate. Unconditional love, though, is what most dog owners desire. The author discovered that whether dogs are capable of love is a subject of much controversy. Some neuroscientists argue that canines do feel love; others think dogs are interested more in treats than in human companionship.
With Americans owning more dogs than any other country in the world, this sprightly, entertaining travelogue should find a delighted readership.Pub Date: July 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4391-4693-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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