A tender, heartfelt story.
A 20-something’s memoir about the English mastiff that became her “best friend [and] so much more.”
Watt was a college sophomore when her mother took her to shop for a dog. Though “we promised ourselves we were just going to look,” by the time they drove home, they had bought an English mastiff puppy the author named Gizelle. She knew that the dog was intended to partially make up for her mother’s alcoholism, but she could not stop herself from falling in love with Gizelle, nor could she stop hoping that the dog was a sign that her “best friend” of a mother would finally get sober. Watt eventually took the dog to live with her while she attended the University of Tennessee, where Gizelle became her 160-pound running partner and protector. At 23, the desire to live in a place that was more “energetic, gritty [and] cosmopolitan” took Watt from Knoxville to Manhattan. After securing a small apartment, she took in Gizelle, whose size earned her names like “Cujo” and “Godzilla.” Watt then began working her way up from waitress to public relations assistant and found companionship with a good but dull man who never offered the same emotional satisfaction as Gizelle. As she watched her mother slip away from her and deeper into addiction, Watt discovered that her dog had bone cancer. Determined to make the remaining days of her canine best friend’s life count, she created a “bucket list” of all the things she wanted to experience with her dog before she died—e.g., riding in a boat together or “watch[ing] the snow fall on the beach.” As much a story about growing up as about letting go of things that cannot be changed, Watt’s book is also a reminder of the profound healing connection that can exist between humans and the pets they love.
A tender, heartfelt story.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2365-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.
Jackie Kennedy's secret service agent Hill and co-author McCubbin team up for a follow-up to Mrs. Kennedy and Me (2012) in this well-illustrated narrative of those five days 50 years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Since Hill was part of the secret service detail assigned to protect the president and his wife, his firsthand account of those days is unique. The chronological approach, beginning before the presidential party even left the nation's capital on Nov. 21, shows Kennedy promoting his “New Frontier” policy and how he was received by Texans in San Antonio, Houston and Fort Worth before his arrival in Dallas. A crowd of more than 8,000 greeted him in Houston, and thousands more waited until 11 p.m. to greet the president at his stop in Fort Worth. Photographs highlight the enthusiasm of those who came to the airports and the routes the motorcades followed on that first day. At the Houston Coliseum, Kennedy addressed the leaders who were building NASA for the planned moon landing he had initiated. Hostile ads and flyers circulated in Dallas, but the president and his wife stopped their motorcade to respond to schoolchildren who held up a banner asking the president to stop and shake their hands. Hill recounts how, after Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots, he jumped onto the back of the presidential limousine. He was present at Parkland Hospital, where the president was declared dead, and on the plane when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Hill also reports the funeral procession and the ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery. “[Kennedy] would have not wanted his legacy, fifty years later, to be a debate about the details of his death,” writes the author. “Rather, he would want people to focus on the values and ideals in which he so passionately believed.”
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3149-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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