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
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
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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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