A realistic, joyful account.
Klam (You Had Me at Woof, 2010, etc.) offers a collection of compassionate tales of dog rescue.
Canine lovers will sit up and take notice, as this slim volume delivers much heart and Klam’s signature self-deprecating humor. When financial struggles culminated in a move to a dangerous city neighborhood, the author and her husband had their hands full with a young daughter and three rambunctious dogs. Further money woes added strain to their relationship. Then they stumbled upon Morris, a lovable mixed pit bull who had been tied to a street sign on a hot day and abandoned without food or water. One does not have to be a dog owner to cringe at the image of cigarette burn marks on Morris’ paw or to understand how helping this sweet dog brought Klam and her husband closer together. The author also introduces readers to other beloved but challenging cases like Clementine who suffered with fecal incontinence. Those who work in animal rescue will relate to the camaraderie of teamwork involved, via Facebook and Twitter feeds, in striving to find good homes for older or infirm dogs. After a trip to New Orleans for a fundraiser, Klam realized that rescuers are only human, but “there is a superpower that comes from knowing you’re making a difference in the world around you.”
A realistic, joyful account.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59448-828-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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