An engaging, instructional work that could be a pet owner’s best friend.
An appealing debut that aims to enlighten dog owners about their pets’ ailments.
When Rade’s canine, Jasmine, became terribly ill, she agonized over whether she’d neglected any of her beloved pet’s symptoms. It led her to write this book so that other dog owners would be aware of potential signs of sickness. “Potential” is the operative word here; one of the book’s strengths is in how it identifies observable symptoms without drawing definitive conclusions. Instead, Rade rightly advises dog owners to get to know their pets’ habits, understand when something isn’t right, and seek veterinary assistance when needed. The book begins with a good overview about how dog owners can advocate for their pets’ health. Included are helpful chapters on interacting with vets, obtaining second opinions, scheduling wellness exams, and dealing with emergencies. The bulk of the content, however, revolves around the symptoms themselves. Rade tackles them chapter by chapter, identifying each one individually, describing it in detail, and including a section titled “When is it an Emergency?” Panting and drooling, for instance, may or may not be normal behaviors, depending on the circumstances, and the author does a fine job of differentiating normal from abnormal. She goes into graphic detail about such subjects as vomit and feces, which some readers may find repellent, but it’s unquestionably highly educational. For example, “What’s in the Poop?” provides useful intelligence about the appearance, consistency, color, and content of a dog’s feces—all of which could be helpful information for a dog owner and, ultimately, a vet. Rade writes conversationally and informally, applying wit where appropriate, and the black-and-white photographs of dogs are charming. She acknowledges the input of veterinarians as she was writing the book, which supports its credibility. As for Jasmine, the dog that started it all, Rade was told by one vet the situation was terminal, but she got a second opinion. As a result, “Jasmine recovered from that medical disaster, and others, and lived over four more happy years.”
An engaging, instructional work that could be a pet owner’s best friend.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9952474-0-6
Page Count: 186
Publisher: Dawg Business Publications
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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