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THE LEGACY OF BEEZER AND BOOMER

Name: THE LEGACY OF BEEZER AND BOOMER
Author: Doug Koktavy
ISBN: 978-0982126004

LESSONS ON LIVING AND DYING FROM MY CANINE BROTHERS

by Doug Koktavy ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 21, 2010

Not simply a story about the pain of losing pets, the book keenly relates the pleasures of owning them.

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Both a touching chronicle of canine deaths foretold and a paean to the joy of owning pets.

Currently, dogs enjoy not just broad popularity in our culture, but they also occupy a blurred line between human and animal. If you don’t have pets—or if you have pets but don’t love them like family—the relationship between Koktavy and his canine companions will be hard to fathom because Legacy is a memoir about grieving the loss of two brothers who just happen to be dogs. In 1995, the author’s wife coerced him into adopting two black Labrador retrievers, Beezer and Boomer. A few years later, the wife was gone, but the dogs remained. Hesitant at first, Koktavy eventually fell hard for his puppies: he invented silly nicknames for them, he threw them birthday parties with funny hats and he called them his “brothers.” Then he had to watch them both die. As Beezer neared his ninth birthday, he developed a fatal kidney disease. Shortly after Beezer’s passing, Boomer contracted a bone cancer that would take his life. In the early stages of Beezer’s struggle, Koktavy began writing; many authors had written about lost pets, he thought, but few had chronicled the actual process of losing animals who were also true companions. His attempt to do so is genuinely moving. Koktavy writes of his love for his dogs—and of the grief that followed their deaths—with unpretentious candor. He never hides the remarkable intimacy he shared with Boomer and Beezer, and if his closeness with the dogs is slightly off-putting at the beginning of his tale, it is downright enviable by the end. Gorgeous etchings by Chris Smith showing the two pups at play and at rest add visual depth to the narrative.

Not simply a story about the pain of losing pets, the book keenly relates the pleasures of owning them.

Pub Date: June 21, 2010

ISBN: 978-0982126004

Page Count: 328

Publisher: B Brothers

Review Posted Online: June 2, 2010

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)