A warm and humane tribute to animals who enrich our lives.
The pain and joy of loving animals.
Fine, a holistic veterinarian and expert in “the emerging field of veterinary narrative medicine, draws on her 30-year career to create a lively, often moving memoir of caring for animals. As part of her training in vet school, she worked with large animals on a farm in upstate New York, collaborated with a Peace Corps vet among nomadic herders in Morocco, and spent time at a clinic in the Navajo Nation in Arizona. Most of her career, though, has been devoted to treating house pets: cats and dogs—and one family’s 10 ferrets and another’s massive pig—in her native Massachusetts. Fine recalls the many sick, injured, and aged animals she has treated, and she is consistently empathetic about the distress of animal owners facing a dire diagnosis. To augment her arsenal of treatments, she has learned animal acupuncture and the use of herbal remedies from traditional Chinese veterinary medicine. Inevitably, because owners typically outlive their pets, the author has had to euthanize animals, a decision that she knows is traumatic for the owner—and for veterinarians, as well. Noting the unusually high suicide rate among veterinarians, she acknowledges the stresses of the profession, and she applauds the creation of a new field of veterinary social work to address the ethical and psychological issues practitioners face. “Veterinarians are commonly confronted with not only animals in crisis,” she writes, “but people in crisis.” Besides sharing her experiences as a veterinarian, Fine writes about her own relationships with the animals she’s adopted. When one dog was diagnosed with inoperable cancer, the author despaired; when she needed to be euthanized, her death plummeted her into darkest grief. For readers facing the end of an animal’s life, the author offers guidance about how to create rituals for grieving, how to write an animal’s obituary, and where to find support books, websites, and hotlines.
A warm and humane tribute to animals who enrich our lives.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780593466896
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
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
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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