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
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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