A thoughtful and balanced look at what people require of their pets.
Journalist and novelist Katz (The Father’s Club, 1996, etc.) delves further into the canine territory he first explored in A Dog Year (2002).
Now that dogs work less at herding and the other skills they were bred for, he wonders, what kinds of work are they being asked to do? Correlating the skyrocketing pet population with excessive TV, Internet, and DVD use, Katz believes that dogs are being solicited to tend to Americans’ emotional needs in a society whose members feel disconnected from one another. He focuses on his hometown, Montclair, New Jersey, to examine the evolving human-dog relationship. We meet Sandra Robinson, a childless, separated, middle-aged woman who gets a dachshund puppy named Eleanor Rigby for all the wrong reasons; she wants it to resolve issues from her past and to serve as an anchor in the midst of enormous personal and professional changes. Ellie tries admirably to fulfill all these emotional needs, and everything’s fine until Robinson begins to recover her footing and starts to view the puppy as “demanding and whiney.” We also meet Betty Jean Scirro, an office worker who has dedicated her life to rescuing abused and abandoned dogs, then rehabilitating them in her small house until they can be adopted. (“What does it say about a country that’s developed an extraordinarily sophisticated and comprehensive structure for saving dogs, but no equivalent one for rescuing endangered or troubled people?” Katz asks.) Other encounters involve Rob Cochran, an overworked attorney who considers his Lab his best friend; terminally ill Donna Dwight and her Welsh corgi (this story alone is worth the price of the book); and 14-year-old Jamal Sutton, who has an abusive relationship with a pit bull. Although Katz owns two border collies and is clearly wild about dogs in general, he is troubled that owners try to deny or alter the very nature of animals to suit their needs.
A thoughtful and balanced look at what people require of their pets.Pub Date: May 13, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50814-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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