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
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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