Descriptive and sensitive stories of one woman and the animals she rescued from abuse and death.
How one woman's childhood dream to save animals came true.
For Laks, the world of animals was always more real than that of humans. She didn't understand the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of babysitters, but surrounded by animals and nature, she found solace and meaning. "The force that drove me to be with animals defied all reason,” she writes. “I was compelled to have them near me no matter what. I began feeling little whispers deep inside—not in words, just in knowing.” This drive continued into adulthood, through three years of crack use, and ultimately pushed Laks to become an animal rescuer. She started out small and quickly discovered a huge world of animals in desperate need of salvation. Dogs, cats, goats, pigs, horses, rabbits, chickens—Laks' Gentle Barn filled with one animal after another, which she brought back from the brink of euthanasia, disease and neglect, nursing the animals with a combination of unconditional love and respect and healthy foods and supplements. Knowing how happy the animals made her feel, Laks opened her barnyard to at-risk kids, foster children and the general public, teaching people how to read animal body language and show respect to their fellow creatures. The overwhelming response was positive for animals and humans alike. Despite financial setbacks and a failed marriage, Laks remained true to her animals. In the process, she found new love. Her stories of animal rescues, oftentimes from desperate and horribly filthy circumstances, are filled with the sensitivity and kindheartedness she shows her animals. Her honesty and success stories open the door to the world of animal care and cruelty, forcing readers to contemplate the lines among animals as pets, objects and food.
Descriptive and sensitive stories of one woman and the animals she rescued from abuse and death.Pub Date: March 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-34766-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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