Dog-loving preschoolers will want to hear it again and again; a good addition to a library or school’s nonfiction collection.
Dogs and kids go together like peanut butter and jelly in DeBear’s picture book about therapy dogs.
Toby and Tutter are therapy dogs who work with their “human mother,” an occupational therapist for small children. They perform many activities with the children—snuggle, play ball, show them how to walk on the balance beam and slide down the slide, and help them stay calm and focused during therapy. In DeBear’s (Be Quiet, Marina!, 2001) tale, first Toby narrates and then Tutter. Toby is a big, long-haired mutt, older and more experienced. Tutter is younger, a big-eyed Italian greyhound who looks up to Toby and hopes to be just as good a therapy dog someday. The prose is simple, clear and well-calibrated to her target audience of preschoolers. DeBear doesn’t shy away from using some words that will require explanation (like “occupational therapy”), and she surrounds these words with plenty of context clues. Bright photos of the dogs in the playroom accompany the text. Young audiences will love seeing pictures of kids their age with the dogs, and the photo of Toby coming headfirst down the slide is exactly the sort of thing kids beg to see over and over again. Unfortunately, the whole thing is about twice as long as it needs to be. It’s easy to imagine the preschool set—who, as a rule, love animals and love simple, true stories about the real world—sitting in rapt attention for most of the book but losing interest toward the end. There are often too many ideas and too many words per page. Keeping track of several storylines—what therapy dogs do, Toby and Tutter’s complicated sibling relationship, Tutter’s hopes to be a trained therapy dog—may be too much for some kids to take in on the first reading. But that just means there are more details for them to pick up on when they hear it for the second, third and 10th times.
Dog-loving preschoolers will want to hear it again and again; a good addition to a library or school’s nonfiction collection.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2012
ISBN: 9780984781201
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Toby & Tutter Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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