A heartfelt testimony about the importance of dogs, especially Dalmatians, in one woman’s life.
The story of the Dalmatians that filled a woman’s life.
Anyone who has owned a dog knows the special place that animals can hold in the heart. For Sexton (Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton, 2011, etc.), Dalmatians had always been the choice for family dog, from the first one, Penny, to the most recent, Cody. As the author eloquently portrays, no other breed suited the Sexton family as well. “How was it possible to love, so relentlessly, this single, particular breed, one often described with words like neurotic, nervous, hyper, skitzy, over-excitable, snappish, and downright nasty?” she writes. “…We had always rooted for the underdog, perhaps because we were underdogs ourselves, crippled by the shadow of my mother’s continuing mental illness.” Despite a stint of dogless years at the beginning of her marriage, for most of her life, Sexton has been surrounded by at least one Dalmatian. She highlights each dog in her life as she recounts how she learned to show them, to breed them and to love them unconditionally, despite the dogs that fought each other, chased cars or had the wrong markings for a champion. Her devotion to her dogs is evident throughout as she narrates emergency runs to the vet for mushroom or chocolate poisoning or the extra-special care she provided for her laboring bitches. And the dogs returned her love, giving emotional support when Sexton’s depression went into high gear or when a number of friends, over a period of years, contracted different kinds of cancer and eventually died. The bond between an animal and a human can be extremely strong, and Sexton proves this without a doubt.
A heartfelt testimony about the importance of dogs, especially Dalmatians, in one woman’s life.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61902-345-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 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.
