A powerful story of dedicated service to abandoned birds and veterans and how bringing them together helped save them all.
Parrots and military veterans bond and heal each other.
Abused and abandoned parrots are fairly common in the United States. People purchase them for pets without understanding the challenges: They are large, noisy, need plenty of space to fly and forage, want to be with other parrots, and can live more than 50 years. When Lindner fell in love with an abused Moluccan cockatoo she named Sammy, she started on a journey that changed her life. After Sammy, she adopted Mango, another abused cockatoo. At the time, the author was working as a clinical psychologist and also began helping homeless veterans suffering from PTSD. When the veterans were introduced to the parrots and began speaking to them when no one was watching, Lindner had an epiphany. She realized the parrots had fewer emotional problems around the vets, and the men and women with PTSD were much calmer and more capable of handling their stress. So the author decided to start a parrot sanctuary where vets could work with and care for the birds. After much work and many years, Serenity Park was born, built on the grounds of the LA Veterans Administration Healthcare Center. Lindner pleasingly blends the stories of several out-of-luck veterans with those of the abused birds as well as facts and information about the care and maintenance of parrots. She also shares the story of her love for one of the men she helped who has worked with Lindner at Serenity Park for many years. Her story of dedication to the birds she loves and to the men and women she has helped is encouraging and uplifting. Bird lovers, in particular, will enjoy the descriptions of the parrots she saves, each with his or her own unique personality.
A powerful story of dedicated service to abandoned birds and veterans and how bringing them together helped save them all.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-13263-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
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
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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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