by Louise Bernikow ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2007
Witty and unabashedly sentimental, which dog lovers surely won't mind.
Bernikow continues the love story between a woman and a boxer begun in Bark If You Love Me (2000).
“It is an odd failing of historians and biographers,” writes Bernikow, “that the presence of a dog in a writer’s life goes largely unnoticed by them.” For Bernikow, Libro, her beloved boxer with the “imperfect swaggering gait,” served as a brindle-colored Muse. As recounted in Bark, Libro entered the author’s life unexpectedly. Abandoned or lost in New York City’s Riverside Park in the late 1990s, Libro clearly came from a loving home. He was properly trained, at ease with apartment living, understood Spanish and had a special fondness for black men. Unable to locate Libro’s owners, Bernikow reluctantly adopted the boxer; this concluding installment chronicles their nine years together, and Libro’s eventual death. With Libro, Bernikow explored the city like never before, traveled across the country on book tours and learned to endure, and eventually befriend, “dog people.” Balancing each other “like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza,” the writer and her Muse even survived illness (Bernikow had cancer, Libro a ruptured tendon). But all good things come to an end, and the gimpy-legged boxer ultimately succumbed to a tumor. The author chronicles Libro’s decline and her grief in language heartfelt and genuine: “For a year after Libro died, my greatest joys were small, daily ones—the garden, the friends, the books read and the books in the process of being written.” She says that she “hated the empty apartment” and that she “never stopped opening the door carefully, as though a creature with amber eyes and a set of paws might be waiting just inside.”
Witty and unabashedly sentimental, which dog lovers surely won't mind.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-7382-1096-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Da Capo Lifelong
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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