Chronicles the entire journey of one man and his dog, illuminating the ways animals enhance our lives.
A heartfelt memoir that chronicles one man’s relationship with his mixed-breed dog.
At the age of 10, Camen had his heart broken when his parents, without rhyme or reason, took away his puppy. Camen harbored a deep bitterness about the loss and never got close to another dog. Then a miracle comes into his life in the form of a half-Sheltie, half–American Eskimo puppy. Told in an earnest and humorous voice, Camen’s memoir traces his 13-year journey with his dog, Snoopy. From the moment Camen saw the pup at the Burbank Animal Shelter, he knew there was something special about him. Not being an animal person, Camen learned how to take care of a canine. The memoir is full of anecdotes that every dog owner and animal lover will appreciate—Snoopy’s love for the plastic children’s slide in the park, his obsession with bones and his harmless wrestling matches with Melvin the cat. More emotional stories also occur, such as when Camen took Snoopy to visit his aging parents, who never did realize the trauma they caused by taking away that first puppy. But through Snoopy, Camen was able to somewhat forgive them. Some vignettes could have been skipped, including an undramatic near run-in with a junkyard cat and the time the author, a vegetarian, ate lard-fried chips. It’s clear Camen’s memoir is really about his need to work through his grief over losing Snoopy, and it sometimes reads as a bit self-indulgent. Yet Camen’s love for the Sheltie–American Eskimo mix is so strong that it radiates off the pages. The heartbreaking portion of the memoir is the way Camen tells of Snoopy’s gradual decline. At the heart of Camen and Snoopy’s story is the remarkable bond between human and dog. For Camen, Snoopy made him a more caring, loving and compassionate person.
Chronicles the entire journey of one man and his dog, illuminating the ways animals enhance our lives.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1936672554
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Cedar Forge Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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.
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
SEEN & HEARD
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
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