For over 20 years, Hebard has devoted much of her time to saving people's lives as part of a human-canine volunteer rescue team. This is her inspirational, often heartrending tale, cowritten with Whittemore (Find the Magician!, 1980, etc.). Hebard is one of the pioneers in this type of rescue work. Her earliest cases involve finding hikers and children lost in the woods, as well as missing elderly peopleall in the proximity of her suburban New Jersey home. Working with her personally trained German shepherdsshe's had several different faithful partners over the yearsher growing reputation eventually leads her to be called upon to find victims after various national and foreign disasters: earthquakes in Mexico City and Armenia, hurricane Hugo in South Carolina, and most recently, the bombing at the Oklahoma City federal building. Rescue missions are grueling and dangerous, often requiring that both human and canine partners climb over and through piles of rubble and debris in order to get inside collapsed buildings where survivors might be located. It is often grim work as well; more often than not, Hebard must mark the locations of dead bodies her team has found. Her return home from missions is often difficult psychologically, since she must quickly switch gears from rescue worker to wife and homemaker for her physicist husband and four children. Currently a co-leader of the US Disaster Team Canine Unit, Hebard is dedicated to improving the performance of canine search-and-rescue teams; between missions, she conducts symposiums in her field, emphasizing the importance of love and trust between human and canine partners. Compelling reading, but because of all the disaster-site details, not for the squeamish. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 12, 1995
ISBN: 0-553-09951-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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
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
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