Bittersweet in its telling, Katz reminds readers of the importance of human and animal connections.
Best-selling author Katz (Going Home: Finding Peace When Pets Die, 2012, etc.) brings readers the intimate story of falling in love with a woman and her extremely protective pet dog.
"There was me, sixty-one, broke and bewildered,” writes Katz, the prolific author of books about pets and, in particular, dogs. “And there was Maria, a sad, brooding fiber artist in her forties…seeking to find her lost creative soul…and finally there was Frieda, aka “the Helldog,” a Rottweiler-shepherd mix who had been cruelly abandoned.” What starts out as a story of despair—for Katz and Maria, as their respective long-term marriages fell apart, and for Frieda, who was raised as a guard dog and then abandoned only to spend years living in the wild—turns to joy as faith, trust, friendship and love replace fear, extreme panic attacks and an overprotectiveness bordering on dangerous. Nearly 20 years older than Maria, Katz felt a sense of urgency to create a life with her and Frieda, but he tamed his desperate need to love and be loved and learned that infinite patience would finally win the hearts of woman and canine. With Maria, he expressed tenderness and an awareness of her stalwart desire for independence—yet he was persistent in his marriage proposals. With Frieda, hundreds of pounds of beef jerky, steady training and an understanding of the dog's past experiences helped create a bond that allowed Katz to move closer to both dog and the woman he felt was his soul mate. "The poet Rumi says to gamble everything for love if you're a true human being,” he writes. “We did. We are."
Bittersweet in its telling, Katz reminds readers of the importance of human and animal connections.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-345-53117-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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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