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The Puppy Diet

Name: The Puppy Diet
Author: Beryl Jupiter
ISBN: 978-1480283558

AND OTHER ENDEARING FAMILY DOG TAILS

by Beryl Jupiter ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 7, 2013

An anecdote-heavy manual appropriate for new or potential dog owners.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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IN MY PLACE

by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992

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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-374-17563-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
MY PEOPLE
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

- BOOK REVIEW
TO THE MOUNTAINTOP
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

- BOOK REVIEW
NEW NEWS OUT OF AFRICA
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

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A LITTLE HISTORY OF POETRY

by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.

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A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.

In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.