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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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