Ardent dog lovers will be inspired by Morie’s dedication, but neither the story nor the prose is compelling enough to reach...
Journalist/novelist Sherrill (The Ruins of California, 2006, etc.) chronicles a man’s quest to save a nearly extinct native Japanese dog.
One of the earliest known species, Akita hunting dogs have long been revered in Japan as cornerstones of national culture, symbols of loyalty and pride. In the years following World War I, when Morie Sawataishi was growing up in the remote snow country, Akitas were plentiful. By the final years of World War II, as the navy veteran returned to the snow country with his young wife, Kitako, he found the breed nearly gone; Akitas had been trapped and killed for fur to line the officers’ uniforms. Morie was in the tiny village of Hachimantai to supervise the construction of hydroelectric plants for Mitsubishi. Life there was rustic and isolated. Kitako worked most of the day just keeping the fire stoked and the rice cooking; she longed for her family in Tokyo. Far from a doctor, the couple lost two of their six children to illness. But from the moment he acquired his first Akita in 1944, Morie’s primary attention was devoted to his dogs. Over the years, he raised hundreds of Akitas, lavishing them with rare affection and tender care. Among the most notable were Three Good Lucks, who won countless dog shows, and Homan, who fathered generations of puppies. Morie’s breeding, along with that of fellow enthusiasts, bolstered the population and made them popular again. Along with the dogs came a series of colorful characters, including a nomadic hunter who bonded with the couple and an Akita-obsessed X-ray technician who became Morie’s favorite trainer. As the century progressed, the snow country became more civilized, getting a hospital, electricity and high-speed trains, much to Kitako’s delight. But having spent a lifetime with Morie and the dogs, she had also begun to appreciate the value of the land and of the animals her husband helped to protect. Sherrill presents an interesting slice of life, but her writing is simplistic and her plotting lacks focus.
Ardent dog lovers will be inspired by Morie’s dedication, but neither the story nor the prose is compelling enough to reach beyond this specific audience.Pub Date: March 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59420-124-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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