by Jon Katz ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 23, 2017
Animal lovers with a bent for the woo-woo will enjoy this well-intended but often cloying book.
Forget about ordering your dog to sit. Instead, breathe, imagine, visualize.
We’re not in the tough-hided world of Temple Grandin here: Katz (Saving Simon: How a Rescue Donkey Taught Me the Meaning of Compassion, 2015, etc.) is a soft-hearted, warm advocate for animals of all kinds, and he’s disinclined to use tried-and-true methods of demand and reward. Of one dog, he writes, “I had no commands to give Rose, no words, but I had images and I painted a sketch in my head of what I wanted to happen.” That’s about as New Age–y as it gets, but it helps explain why just about every town in America now sports a business for pet psychiatrists and animal communicators. It’s when the animals start talking back that things get a little weird, as when said dog supposedly remarked, “I can do it, give me a chance to succeed.” A little of this goes a long way, and there’s a lot of it—a lot of what Katz calls “sweet noise.” Still, the author chronicles many affecting encounters with animals, and it is indisputable that, as Katz observes, animals are disappearing from our lives, “vanishing at a horrific rate.” For all the tender moments and divinations of body language—a horse with its head down is not fearful but relaxed—the author is capable of righteous fire. When it comes to Bill de Blasio and the ban on carriage horses in New York, circuses, and such, he gets his dander up: “It has become a popular idea in America, this notion that it is cruel for working animals to work with people, exploitive for animals to uplift or entertain people.” It seems a curious mix of purposes to want to talk with bunnies on one hand and draft animals on the other, but it’s of a piece with Katz’s particular brand of advocacy, which has many supporters.
Animal lovers with a bent for the woo-woo will enjoy this well-intended but often cloying book.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9547-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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by Brian Fies illustrated by Brian Fies ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 5, 2019
Drawings, words, and a few photos combine to convey the depth of a tragedy that would leave most people dumbstruck.
A new life and book arise from the ashes of a devastating California wildfire.
These days, it seems the fires will never end. They wreaked destruction over central California in the latter months of 2018, dominating headlines for weeks, barely a year after Fies (Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?, 2009) lost nearly everything to the fires that raged through Northern California. The result is a vividly journalistic graphic narrative of resilience in the face of tragedy, an account of recent history that seems timely as ever. “A two-story house full of our lives was a two-foot heap of dead smoking ash,” writes the author about his first return to survey the damage. The matter-of-fact tone of the reportage makes some of the flights of creative imagination seem more extraordinary—particularly a nihilistic, two-page centerpiece of a psychological solar system in which “the fire is our black hole,” and “some veer too near and are drawn into despair, depression, divorce, even suicide,” while “others are gravitationally flung entirely out of our solar system to other cities or states, and never seen again.” Yet the stories that dominate the narrative are those of the survivors, who were part of the community and would be part of whatever community would be built to take its place across the charred landscape. Interspersed with the author’s own account are those from others, many retirees, some suffering from physical or mental afflictions. Each is rendered in a couple pages of text except one from a fellow cartoonist, who draws his own. The project began with an online comic when Fies did the only thing he could as his life was reduced to ash and rubble. More than 3 million readers saw it; this expanded version will hopefully extend its reach.
Drawings, words, and a few photos combine to convey the depth of a tragedy that would leave most people dumbstruck.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3585-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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by Helen Macdonald ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2015
Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a...
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An inspired, beautiful and absorbing account of a woman battling grief—with a goshawk.
Following the sudden death of her father, Macdonald (History and Philosophy/Cambridge Univ.; Falcon, 2006, etc.) tried staving off deep depression with a unique form of personal therapy: the purchase and training of an English goshawk, which she named Mabel. Although a trained falconer, the author chose a raptor both unfamiliar and unpredictable, a creature of mad confidence that became a means of working against madness. “The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life,” she writes. As a devotee of birds of prey since girlhood, Macdonald knew the legends and the literature, particularly the cautionary example of The Once and Future King author T.H. White, whose 1951 book The Goshawk details his own painful battle to master his title subject. Macdonald dramatically parallels her own story with White’s, achieving a remarkable imaginative sympathy with the writer, a lonely, tormented homosexual fighting his own sadomasochistic demons. Even as she was learning from White’s mistakes, she found herself very much in his shoes, watching her life fall apart as the painfully slow bonding process with Mabel took over. Just how much do animals and humans have in common? The more Macdonald got to know her, the more Mabel confounded her notions about what the species was supposed to represent. Is a hawk a symbol of might or independence, or is that just our attempt to remake the animal world in our own image? Writing with breathless urgency that only rarely skirts the melodramatic, Macdonald broadens her scope well beyond herself to focus on the antagonism between people and the environment.
Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a classic in either genre.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0802123411
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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