New York Times managing editor Abramson (co-author: Obama: The Historic Journey, 2009, etc.) chronicles her experience raising a boisterous new puppy.
Culled from the author’s Times blog series, the book charts her journey from apprehension about a new pup to delight in her newest family member. In the wake of losing a much-beloved pet and on the heels of a difficult injury that left her unsteady on her feet, Abramson and her husband finally decided to welcome a new puppy, Scout, and her nearly boundless energy into their lives. Scout’s gradual and difficult transition from country life to the bustling streets of Tribeca brought new challenges for all concerned: puppy day care, advanced leash instruction and making friends (both human and canine) at the neighborhood dog park. Yet despite Abramson’s delight in Scout, the narrative suffers from an identity crisis. If the book is a memoir, it lacks depth of insight and analysis about the dog-human relationship. If it is a training manual, the author provides woefully few details about specific skills that can strengthen both a dog’s mind and the relationship between animal and human. It may be best categorized as a lifestyle book, as it provides a glimpse into a small window of modern dog ownership: wealthy, American baby boomers. Indeed, writes the author, “there is no Official Puppy Handbook for fifty-somethings,” but this flourishing community of new owners have unique concerns about raising and caring for their dogs. Scout appears to be a lovable dog, but much of the fun of new dog ownership is overshadowed by the author’s persistent cadence of anxieties about puppyhood.
Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9342-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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