Best for staunch fanciers of fey animal tales.
Domesticated journalist Tarte follows up his first report on life with critters, Enslaved by Ducks (2003).
The family house in Michigan is home to half-a-dozen indoor birds, mostly parrots, and indoor mammals including cats, rabbits and a skunk. Lodged behind the house is a flock of fowl: ducks, geese and a chicken. The backyard is an animal necropolis. Naturally, Bob and wife Linda, busily tending to their animal charges, just love them all. Reading like a sitcom with a menagerie, the book offers stories of a difficult garden hose, an underfed spider, the eviction of yellow jackets, an adopted apartment-bred duck, a nest of mice in a favorite chair and the tube feeding of an ailing parrot—along with some innocent laughs about Linda’s aching back. A friendly vet ministers to a dying bunny and fixes an egg-bound bird. Mentions of the death of the author’s father and the distressing Alzheimer’s of his increasingly demented mother are certainly troubling, but the text balances them with the comfort of Tarte’s Ark, filled with personable animals like Louie, Ollie, Stanley Sue, “a buff-colored Buff Orpington named Buffy” and a sock monkey. Tarte offers a few bits and pieces concerning humans, but they’re overwhelmed by garrulous pieces about the pets that disappear and appear, clucking, squalling and smelling from basement to attic. The author’s previous work yielded some amusements, but now it’s time to clean house a bit. Tarte’s current presentation of fun with fauna tests just how far personification of animals can go before a grip on normal life begins to loosen.
Best for staunch fanciers of fey animal tales.Pub Date: March 16, 2007
ISBN: 1-56512-502-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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