A moving call to action.
Freelance journalist Kavin (The Everything Travel Guide to Italy, 2010, etc.) hunts down the story of what happened to her rescue dog Boy Blue.
In 2010, the author helped rescue Blue from certain death in an animal shelter in North Carolina. She found him online and was able to quickly provide the lucky survivor with a loving home, where he has flourished. Learning that her new companion might have been infected with ringworm and fearing “that something about his situation had been horribly, horribly wrong,” she applied her investigating skills to uncovering the trail. Her first step was contacting Lulu’s Rescue co-founder Michele Armstrong, who told her that Blue had been “headed for the gas chamber.” The trail then led her to Person County Animal Rescue volunteers in North Carolina, who introduced her to the brutal conditions that Blue faced when he got dumped into the animal shelter. There are 13,000 rescue groups listed online at Petfinder.com, all struggling to find homes for unwanted puppies. The author describes them as functioning “like a modern day version of the underground railroad,” and that's only the tip of the iceberg. Many unaffiliated volunteers are also involved in rescue efforts. The rescue groups often set standards for shelters and promote the spaying and neutering of animals put up for adoption, as well as finding loving homes, but money and volunteers are in short supply. This book chronicles one of the success stories. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to the Petfinder.com Foundation.
A moving call to action.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7641-6526-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Barron's
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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