Not simply a story about the pain of losing pets, the book keenly relates the pleasures of owning them.
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
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
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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