A heartwarmingly compassionate memoir of self-discovery among cherished animals in “a scrap of Virginia countryside.”
A former international lawyer tells the story of how she took over a “ratty little farm” in Virginia and became an improbable shepherdess.
When George’s 85-year-old father visited the 27-acre farm she had bought on a whim, he told her that she lived in “poetry country” and that her land needed sheep. Together they went to a local breeder’s home where George eventually purchased 13 lambs she intended to keep as pets. The sheep were Karakuls, a Central Asian breed known for producing wool that carpet and felt makers prized for its beauty and toughness. The author named each sheep after favorite composers like Chopin, Bach, and Mozart, and from the start, she marveled at the personality differences that made each sheep unique. Over the next 13 years, George watched her life transform dramatically. Her days were centered on simpler country rhythms that included shearing, training, and feeding her Karakuls. The sheep became her constant companions on daily walks around her property and attended the occasional gatherings she held at her home. They even befriended her father, who read his favorite literary works among them. Indeed, the link between “The Lambs” and the elder George was so strong that the flock came to symbolize the author’s “most valuable inheritance, the sound of my father's voice repeating the words and images of his dearly loved poetry.” The Karakuls also inspired George to pick up “the thread of my literary life” that she had dropped in pursuit of a successful law career. Illustrated throughout with lovingly captioned photos, the book is not just a testament to the power of human-animal connections. It is also a tender, joyfully eccentric recollection of how a woman rediscovered what was most important to her through a singular relationship with an unforgettable flock of sheep.
A heartwarmingly compassionate memoir of self-discovery among cherished animals in “a scrap of Virginia countryside.”Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-11352-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
