A handy, easy-to-read manual, particularly for neophyte pet owners in urban areas, where dog parks are essential for...
A primer about appropriate canine (and human) behavior during public playtime.
The dog park has become the site of much folklore, community policing, and sociological interest in America. In this debut work, Lee readily admits that she’s not an expert on animal training, so she bases her recommendations on many years of active participation and keen observation in the dog park area reserved for larger animals. Much confusion stems from human misperceptions of canine behavior, Lee says, and she seeks to set the record straight. “Each time you go is a new experience, because no two days there are ever alike,” she advises from the outset. “The mix of dogs and people are never the same, and you can never anticipate what might happen.” Although this may strike some new dog owners as somewhat alarming, the author provides general rules and strategies so that readers will feel prepared for all contingencies. Chapters specifically delve into such subjects as “Puppies,” “Children at the Dog Park,” “Neutering,” “Balls and Personal Toys,” “Body Language,” and “Prejudices.” One of the author’s salient recommendations is to take one’s dog for a walk before hitting the park so that the pet expends some excess energy in advance. Lee also urges owners to note and avoid the specific times when professional dog walkers bring large packs, pointing out that it’s virtually impossible for one person to keep tabs on so many dogs and that, logically, they’re more likely to get into trouble under such circumstances. As an added bonus, Lee sometimes adopts the voice of Buster, her 60-pound American Staffordshire terrier mix, to offer a dog’s unique perspective on the matters at hand; she crafts an introduction and conclusion as her pet, as well as one of the middle chapters. Even grizzled dog park veterans who’ve seen it all may appreciate this refresher course, and all dog lovers will enjoy Lee’s anecdotes, which she uses to illustrate specific points. Overall, she writes in a clear, accessible style and approaches her subject matter with humor in the hope that everyone will experience fun and safe adventures.
A handy, easy-to-read manual, particularly for neophyte pet owners in urban areas, where dog parks are essential for exercise and socialization.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5347-2893-6
Page Count: 82
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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
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