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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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