An often sweet story for cat lovers of all stripes.
Payne’s debut memoir is an upbeat celebration of one man’s love for his four-legged feline friend.
It may be hard for some people to believe that a gun-loving, Harley-riding military veteran from Alabama would write gushing sentiments about his cat, but Payne has been an unabashed cat lover since he was a young child. This friendly memoir combines the story of Payne’s own life—he was an officer in the U.S. Air Force and later a mechanical engineer for the U.S. Army—with tales of his many beloved pets, particularly a spunky, oversized gray tabby cat named Little Man. Beginning with some humorous and some poignant childhood anecdotes (not surprisingly, his mother was also a cat lover), Payne describes several memorable pets, such as Butch, a lovable but dimwitted kitty who didn’t notice when a lit birthday candle set his tail on fire. Then there was Cindy, a mean little Chihuahua who was born with a crooked jaw, so that her tongue permanently stuck out. All of Payne’s animals had plenty of personality, but the one who held a special place in his heart was Little Man, who would head-butt the bedroom door until someone let him in. As the author tells their fast-paced story, it becomes obvious that he and Little Man are a lot alike. Both had their own difficulties to face—Little Man is diabetic, and Payne’s family struggled financially—yet they both thrived, despite the odds. Ultimately, Payne earned his “jump wings” badge in parachutist training and attended test pilot school. Little Man faced a much bigger challenge, as he struggled to survive a severe, mysterious illness. At times, the story rambles as the author jumps from place to place, including many details of his own life; for example, reading about his scuba diving excursion to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, and how he posed for pictures with the koalas at the zoo, can sometimes feel like one is watching a friend’s unexciting home movies. It also takes a while to get to the heart of the story, which is Little Man’s illness. However, pet lovers who hang in there will be touched by Little Man’s and Payne’s determination.
An often sweet story for cat lovers of all stripes.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1493634040
Page Count: 338
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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