Next book

GOOD BOY

MY LIFE IN SEVEN DOGS

Intimate and insightful glimpses into Boylan’s life and the dogs that have helped her learn more about love.

A memoir told through the lens of seven canine companions.

Often, it’s difficult to remember all the details of our lives and the people we once were. “But I remember the dogs,” writes New York Times columnist and LGBTQ activist Boylan, who is on the PEN America board of trustees and serves as the inaugural Anna Quindlen writer in residence at Barnard College. In her latest, the author ties each of the seven chapters to a phase of her life and a dog she has loved. The narrative is somewhat chronological, but the dog stories and timelines also skip around a lot, which occasionally becomes disorienting. As in her previous books, Boylan's wry wit, wicked sense of humor, and unique way of turning phrases shine through, and her candor is powerfully therapeutic. Particularly stunning is the section in which she describes her initial reactions when a close family member also came out as trans. However, this book is not a Boylan primer. Readers who have not encountered She’s Not There (2003), her memoir about her transition from male to female, may long for more detail in this book; the author sometimes skims over major life events she has written about elsewhere. But this is about the dogs, and the canine theme emerged from a Times opinion column, in which she wrote about her dog Indigo, that went viral in 2017. Boylan’s stories about each dog—from Playboy to Sausage to Matt the Mutt to Ranger (whose frequent interactions with porcupines “never ended well”)—range from sidesplitting to downright profound, and the author makes a convincing argument for the inherent need for all creatures to be who they truly are. Though the connections between the dogs and Boylan’s life aren’t always obvious, these tales will entertain, endear, and—fair warning—possibly induce a sudden urge to drive to the local animal shelter.

Intimate and insightful glimpses into Boylan’s life and the dogs that have helped her learn more about love.

Pub Date: April 21, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-250-26187-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Celadon Books

Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 10


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
Next book

INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 10


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating

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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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

Close Quickview