by Jennifer Bleakley ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 8, 2018
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 He also helped to coax Ethan and Aly, two troubled and socially withdrawn children, out of their protective shells.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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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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