Animal lovers will enjoy the sharp scrutiny of the horse’s behavior but may wish for greater authorial introspection.
A romantic exploration of horse ownership.
Poet and novelist Harris (Creative Writing/Univ. of Washington; Oh How Can I Keep On Singing?: Voices of Pioneer Women, 2003, etc.) examines the complexities of her passionate avocation of raising horses. The center of the narrative is her relationship with True Colors, the then-8-year-old blood bay mare Harris and her husband acquired in 1986 as the first step toward fulfilling the author’s childhood dream of breeding horses. Captivated at a young age by equine power and grace, Harris began riding and became adept enough as a young adult to compete in dressage. True Colors was to be the first broodmare brought to the couple’s farm at the foot of Washington’s Cascade Mountains, for the dual purpose of breeding and riding. But Harris soon found they got more and less than they bargained for: True Colors had been so traumatized by being caught in a fire that she was terrified of humans. Thus began the tense psychological dance between owner and horse, as Harris tried to solve the mystery of healing and training this massive animal. While the author quickly realized that her dreams of riding competitively with True Colors would never materialize, she began to recognize the horse’s independence, protectiveness and strength of character. In engrossing detail, Harris describes the physical challenges of horse rearing, from assisting in the birth and first steps of a foal creature to reckoning with the unbridled power of a testosterone-crazed stallion and dealing with the eccentricities of blacksmiths and veterinarians. However, the author never answers the basic question posed early on—what is the meaning of these great beasts in her life?
Animal lovers will enjoy the sharp scrutiny of the horse’s behavior but may wish for greater authorial introspection.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-0584-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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