An honest, heartwarming choice for animal lovers.
Hollars (Creative Writing/Univ. of Wisconsin, Eau Claire; Opening the Doors: The Desegregation of the University of Alabama and the Fight for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa, 2013, etc.) examines what “humans stand to learn as a result of our close-knit lives with our pets.”
In this collection of essays, the author moves beyond interpretation of the human-animal bond to think about what happens when human beings take the time to “listen” to what animals have to “tell” them. The first five essays detail his experiences with pets—including his own beloved childhood dog—and their human caretakers. In “Sniffing for Hope,” Hollars chronicles his shadowing of a county humane officer, an experience that provided him insight into the nature of animal rescue. In another piece, Hollars tells the story of a family and their bulldog Bruiser, a canine who could not stand up on his front legs. Thanks to a specially designed wheeled orthotic, Bruiser became mobile and showed everyone, including the author, the importance of belief. In the last five essays, Hollars revisits each of the lessons learned in the first section with stories that show him testing his insights. In one story, he follows the last hours of a dog condemned, without evidence, to die for killing a cat. He finds himself drawing disturbing parallels with the human criminal justice system while struggling to maintain hope. In another essay, Hollars follows a second disabled dog, Gretchen, who had back legs that dragged “as if weighed down by an invisible force.” Unlike Bruiser, she could not be made more mobile through the orthotics made for her. Ultimately, the book is about the love we have for our pets. Like the dog for which he grieved more than 20 years after her passing, pets make human life “better” by teaching us humility and compassion.
An honest, heartwarming choice for animal lovers.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8032-7729-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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