by Jon Franklin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2009
Should delight dog-lovers and science buffs alike, even though many of Franklin’s conjectures can’t be proven.
Pulitzer Prize–winning science writer Franklin (Journalism/Univ. of Maryland; The Molecules of the Mind, 1987, etc.) explores the symbiotic relationship between man and dog.
When the author proposed to his wife, her response was, “Does this mean that I can have a puppy?” His agreement was the beginning of a happy marriage and a love affair with Charlie, the poodle who joined their family. Franklin’s world was changed as he shared Charlie’s joy and pondered his awareness of things “just beyond the reach of everyday human beings.” It wasn’t surprising that the poodle could nose out hidden wildlife, but he seemed to perceive the emotions of people by their smell as well. During his years on the science beat for the Baltimore Sun, Franklin followed advances in archeology, anthropology and neuroanatomy, but he was startled to find little scientific information about dogs. “How could an animal be everywhere, and yet go almost completely unnoticed by the very people whose job it was to notice things?” he asked himself. Chancing upon a photograph taken at a dig in the Jordan Valley that revealed a man and a pup buried together at a site estimated to be 12,000 years old, he began a ten-year quest to unravel the relationship between the evolution of humans and dogs, both of which appear to have emerged in their modern form at the same time. Franklin branches off in many fascinating directions. Noting that excavations of 400,000-year-old sites show wolf bones and human artifacts intermixed, he speculates that wolves who followed primitive pre-humans were gradually transformed into dogs, which then participated in the domestication of other animals. He concludes that mankind and dogs have evolved symbiotically and are psychologically as essential to each other today as in the past—the dogs for sustenance and the human for companionship and to dump the occasional “emotional weight”—with brains that have evolved accordingly.
Should delight dog-lovers and science buffs alike, even though many of Franklin’s conjectures can’t be proven.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9077-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2009
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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