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
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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