Featherweight, loving moments of one woman and her many dogs. For Steel’s fans and die-hard dog lovers.
The mega-selling novelist shares happy memories of her numerous dogs.
Steel (First Sight, 2013, etc.) brings readers into her life, recounting delightful moments with her many dogs, the dogs her children have owned, and her newest friend, Minnie, her tiny Chihuahua. Minnie dominates the scene as Steel describes the moment she fell in love with this little bundle of joy and the many ups and downs of life with such a tiny dog. "It is absolutely absurd that anything so small should own my heart, but she does,” writes the author. “[O]wning a puppy, or a dog you love, is pure joy…that's what Minnie is for me!!!" In addition to the numerous recollections of the miniature Brussels griffons, Rhodesian ridgeback, basset hounds, and Chihuahuas that Steel and her family have owned, the author sprinkles throughout the book helpful hints on how to take care of a dog. Although not everyone will have the sufficient funds to treat his or her dog as Steel does, anyone who is a pet lover will understand the desire to provide the very best for their animal. The author discusses the pros and cons of traveling with a dog (small dogs like Minnie fare better on airplanes than large dogs, who must be placed in cargo); how to find a vet who will listen to your concerns; how to know when to let a dog die; how to return a dog or place it with someone else when the needed bond between human and dog just doesn't exist. Plainly told with honesty and affection, these stories are an affirmation of the timeless connection between humans and their canine companions.
Featherweight, loving moments of one woman and her many dogs. For Steel’s fans and die-hard dog lovers.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-345-54375-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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BOOK REVIEW
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