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
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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