A tender account of an abused animal’s healing power.
A debut book tells the true story of a horse therapy ranch’s success helping traumatized children.
Kim Tschirret’s father was an emotionally aloof alcoholic. As a child, she found comforting solace in a relationship with her saddlebred horse, Country. That experience inspired her as an adult to found an equine therapy ranch in Raleigh, North Carolina, Hope Reins, a daunting and potentially expensive task but one that her husband, Mike, wholeheartedly supported. The Bay Leaf Baptist Church also believed in her mission and expressed its confidence in her by leasing Tschirret 20 acres of its land for only $1 a month. She learned about the heartbreaking plight of Joey, a leopard Appaloosa, who just barely survived malnourishment after his owners abandoned him. He was found emaciated and blind, and it took weeks to slowly nurse him back to some measure of stable health, all points of concern for Tschirret. But when she heard that he was so gentle he allowed a 5-year-old to ride him bareback, she decided to bring him to Hope Reins. Joey’s impact on the ranch was immediate: he befriended Speckles, a cantankerous horse suffering from terrible arthritic pain. He also helped to coax Ethan and Aly, two troubled and socially withdrawn children, out of their protective shells. But running a horse ranch turned out to be a costly affair, a predicament exacerbated by Speckles’ mounting health care costs. Meanwhile, Sarah Stewart, a young volunteer, became a naturally talented counselor but quietly struggled with an abusive past that she was ashamed of as well as her shaken faith in God. Bleakley lucidly braids all these storylines into a coherent narrative tapestry about the power of faith as an antidote to anxiety and trust in God as a counterpoint to an uncertain future. The prose is plenty sentimental but stops short of becoming cloying, avoiding the pitfall of too laboriously plying a lachrymose reaction from readers. But sometimes the narrative is a bit overly didactic, stressing too ostentatiously the lessons embedded in the story. Still, this is a touching tale, and Joey’s extraordinary, intuitive sensitivity is memorably depicted. At one point, the horse comforts a distraught Ethan: “Joey never moved. He stood fiercely and firmly, providing refuge for the weeping boy. Two deeply wounded creatures were giving and finding solace in one another.”
A tender account of an abused animal’s healing power.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4964-2174-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Tyndale House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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