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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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