An anecdote-heavy manual appropriate for new or potential dog owners.
Living with six family pets over 30 years inspired this nonfiction book about the trials and joys of dog ownership.
In 1973, Jupiter and her husband acquired their first dog, an Irish setter they called Lance. It went so well that the young couple brought another pup home one year later. Four English springer spaniels and two children followed, giving the author plenty of firsthand knowledge to impart about caring for family pets. In the title chapter, she recounts how she capitalized on an unintentional side effect of raising a messy, mischievous puppy: She turned the physically exhausting process into a calculated weight-loss regime. But this book isn’t about dieting. Instead, it’s a thorough depiction of dog ownership from the perspective of a candid matriarch. Jupiter describes how she trained her dogs to use an invisible fence, relates favorite games and tricks, and elaborates on topics such as health care, grooming, and rearing children and multiple pets together. The tone isn’t instructional, however; it reads like a memoir, with specific anecdotes and nostalgic portraits of each of her dogs. It’s hard not to smile when Jupiter decides not to cancel the morning newspaper delivery because Tory the dog enjoys retrieving it so much. The book is divided up by topic—dogs in bed, chow time, doggy empty nest—instead of chronology, which can make it difficult to keep track of each dog’s backstory, sometimes resulting in the same stories being told several times throughout the book. Writing in a forthright, conversational voice, and clearly a devoted dog lover, Jupiter doesn’t shy away from the tough stuff. She covers expenses, training mishaps and the heartbreak of saying goodbye to a pet. Often, in fact, there’s too much detail, as with the eight pages dedicated to one dog’s bed-wetting problem. While episodes such as this don’t make for an exciting literary adventure, the scrupulous explanations may be educationally valuable to readers who are considering adding a dog to their own families.
An anecdote-heavy manual appropriate for new or potential dog owners.Pub Date: May 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1480283558
Page Count: 226
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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