An engaging and informative account of the special bond between people and canines.
A former university research professor argues that humans’ ancient relationship with dogs makes them the perfect therapy animals.
Despite the incredulity of his colleagues, Dr. Boris Levinson pioneered the use of canines as therapy animals back in the 1950s by bringing his pet dog, Jingles, to his practice to make his child patients feel more comfortable. As it turns out, Sigmund Freud had earlier seen similar results with patients and his own dog, Jofi, though his findings were not made public until years after his death. What makes canines such effective therapy animals? As Hagner (Career Advancement, 2002, etc.) writes in his preface, humans’ history with dogs is “so long, in fact, that our two species have undergone biological changes over the millennia as we adapted to one another. The secure feeling we get when man’s best friend is near us is by now hard-wired into our biology.” In this book, the author traces the history of this alliance with dogs, which began when the first friendly wolves entered into a symbiotic relationship with humans over 36,000 years ago, guarding sleeping people in exchange for food. Hagner credits this security innovation—and the increased sleep it afforded—for the explosion of new technologies that occurred during the late Paleolithic era, which began 35,000 to 40,000 years ago. From domestication to sensory interaction to the place of dogs in world mythologies and their uses across cultures, the author shows how this unique pact developed, placing an emphasis on how canines shaped humans. Hagner writes for the layperson, clearly elucidating a number of complex areas, including anthropology, psychology, and human biology: “The genes that control digestion in dogs have adapted to digest the foods humans enjoy better than the diet of wolves. This is part of the reason why what are called feral dogs today primarily eat scavenged human food.” The author is an unabashed dog lover, which sometimes shines through in his preferences for discussing canines. His contentions are generally quite convincing, and those who already attribute great importance to dogs should be happy to be armed with these arguments as to their role in the development of civilization.
An engaging and informative account of the special bond between people and canines.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5462-5637-3
Page Count: 198
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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