Pleasant, sensitive storytelling.
The charmingly quirky story of a woman and the flock of spirited chickens that stole her heart.
When her teenage daughter and friends abandoned it, blogger, illustrator and DIY mom Scheuer knew that her yard, which had once been "a mecca of colorful activities and adventures," needed a makeover. So she transformed it into a home for chickens, which arrived by mail. Scheuer threw herself into the project and built the coop where her hens would roost. In love with her birds from the day they hatched, she documented their daily lives with drawings and photographs, which she includes on almost every page of the book. Her chickens—Hatsy, Lucy and Lil' White—weren't simply lawn ornaments and egg-producers; they were beings with colorfully distinctive personalities. Hatsy was the egg-laying wonder, Lucy the affectionate friend and Lil' White the sometimes mean-spirited beauty. With insight and humor, Scheuer describes the relationships among her animals. She recounts how her terrier Marky "drooled" over them at first but then became their dedicated guardian. The birds themselves had their own dramas. Lucy developed Marek's disease, which crippled her feet. True to the "wild roots" of all chickens, Lil' White suddenly began attacking her. Lucy survived and eventually became the flock "mother," nurturing an egg that contained the flock's one rooster. When Hatsy weakened and died, the birds closed ranks and mourned because "[they] knew.” Scheuer adopted another bird, a scrawny "fixer-upper" named Pigeon, who became both the flock leader and Lucy's new best friend. Scheuer shows that though feathers and fur may separate humans from animals, all creatures are capable of attachment, cruelty, joy and sadness, regardless of the skin they wear.
Pleasant, sensitive storytelling.Pub Date: March 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1451698701
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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