A stirring, inspiring tale for animal lovers.
A debut memoir from the founder of Love from Louie, a canine-rescue nonprofit.
Steenrod and her husband, Denny, share their home with a “pack” of rescue dogs, each abused by former owners. In this book, she writes of the dogs’ determination to live, their sense of forgiveness, their ability to embrace the joy of the moment, and their great capacity for love. She offers a collection of their stories and shows how they each played roles in Steenrod’s life as she navigated her own traumas. The book begins in 2010, just days before the author’s mother died suddenly, leaving her stunned and overcome with grief. As she prepared for and endured the funeral, Steenrod sought solace in her recollections of how she came to know each of her treasured pets. The memoir alternates between different time frames, including past events and others after 2010, and readers may sometimes find it difficult to follow the chronology. Still, the stories are so heartfelt, so individually remarkable, that readers will find this short volume hard to put down. One thread running through the narrative, for example, involves Steenrod’s 30-day attempt to encourage a starving, terrified female Boxer to find comfort and safety in her arms. The prose is filled with the author’s self-deprecating humor, her fury at negligent and cruel humans who mistreat animals, and her gratitude for the strength her dogs have given her to get beyond her own fears. When Steenrod returned home after the funeral, she sat on the kitchen floor, tears streaming down her face: “ ‘Kaya, Rose, Otis, Buddy, Chi-Chi, Angel Momma………’ I trail off, overwhelmed by both loss and love. ‘Oh my god, I’m living in a house with survival experts!’ ” Indeed, this book makes an engaging case that they saved her.
A stirring, inspiring tale for animal lovers.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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