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
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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