A heartening story of healing and interspecies connection.
An engaging debut memoir about the rehabilitation of damaged horses—and humans.
The Delancey Street Foundation’s New Mexico ranch is an alternative prison facility where drug offenders can serve out their sentences. Gaffney, a horse trainer and riding instructor, has volunteered at the ranch since 2013. It initially presented “the most dangerous horse situation I had ever encountered,” she recalls: The herd had gone feral, raiding dumpsters and threatening their keepers. Two mares, including Luna, who had an infected facial injury, were still on the loose. The author believed that livestock team members like Tony, an ex-junkie with anger issues, and Sarah, a former addict and prostitute who’d survived multiple near-fatal attacks, were “unknowingly communicating their pain to the horses.” Gaffney’s first task, then, was to teach the inmates to walk with confidence. Horses “keep us present, keen, concentrating,” she writes. They help Randy conquer his fears and Eliza snap out of her depression. Former addictions remain strong temptations for these residents, though. In a major setback, Gaffney found a stash of drugs and condoms under the barn floorboards, and most of the livestock team got kicked off the ranch. Sharp descriptions bring the book’s human and equine characters to life while present-tense narration animates vivid vignettes: rescuing one horse from a septic field and training another in a 100-day Santa Fe Horse Shelter competition. The book shifts easily between the ranch storyline and the author’s history of extreme introversion and fraught lesbian relationships. The first horse she owned, high-strung Belle, “hinged the broken parts of me back together,” as did her long-term partner, Glenda. This 1990s-set strand feels less essential, but it helps build a solid trajectory of recovery as Gaffney, like the ranch’s residents and horses, changes “into a softer creature…one who can finally trust others and feel like she belongs.”
A heartening story of healing and interspecies connection.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-324-00307-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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