An invaluable resource for providing top-notch care for man’s best friend.
This comprehensive guide to canine cancer delivers standard veterinary information and advice in language that average dog owners will understand.
Kaplan (So Easy to Love, So Hard to Lose, 2010, etc.) has a background in editing veterinary school texts and writing about animals, but her experience caring for her late Siberian husky, Bullet, directly inspired this book. “About half of our dogs will have cancer in their lifetimes,” she learned, “yet most dog owners know little or nothing about caring for a dog with cancer.” Moreover, although some 10,000 dogs are diagnosed with cancer daily, she says, only 250 American veterinarians specialize in oncology. This book thus serves as a layman’s compendium about veterinary oncology, including information on diagnostic tests, treatment methods, side effects, and end-of-life care. As in humans, genetics and diet play a major role in canine cancer, but environmental carcinogens may be more influential, Kaplan says, as dogs are in closer contact with fertilizers and household cleaning products. Treatment options for dogs are also similar to those for people: surgery, followed by radiation or chemotherapy. Luckily, the author says, “Dogs tolerate chemotherapy better than people do,” with minimal hair loss and quick recovery. The book includes lists of symptoms and discussions of types of cancer along with italicized, often illustrated case studies from pet owners, which lend this informative text a personal touch. Kaplan also contributes heartfelt reminiscences of Bullet’s medical history; as a four-year lymphoma survivor, he was a successful outlier. She recommends comparing clinics’ fees and getting second opinions; to that end, she provides helpful sets of questions to ask one’s veterinarian. Getting chemo drugs directly from suppliers, she says, can cut costs, while complementary medicines and human-grade food can contribute to continued health. The book turns sappy when Kaplan discusses “pawspice” care and the “Rainbow Bridge” where departed dogs go—a whimsical shift after the preceding down-to-earth advice. Still, she reassuringly acknowledges that “the loss of a pet is like any loss. Grief is grief.” (Kaplan also mentions the Magic Bullet Fund she launched in 2004, which assists dog owners who can’t afford cancer treatment.)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-097547943-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: JanGen Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
