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CLARA, THE EARLY YEARS

THE STORY OF THE PUG WHO RULED MY LIFE

Pug stories—really a lot of pug stories, from sublime to ridiculous—by Kaufman (This Damn House, 1996). She’s the classic pet owner who is owned by her two pugs, Clara and Sophie. Kaufman considers herself to be the “Official Pug Lollipop,” an utter sap for canine manipulation. Sophie is truculent, “a fourteen-pound reincarnation of Mussolini”; Clara is uncontrollable, scheming, self-protective, watchful, and suspicious, not to mention (sometimes) fawning and sluttish. Kaufman coaxes as many laughs as she can from Clara’s antics (Sophie is too much the taskmaster for drollery and so plays second fiddle in the pug hierarchy). Some dominant themes: Clara dismisses Kaufman’s slavish attention and steals the limelight during her book tours. Thus, Kaufman consults a therapist (the coyly named Dr. Pangloss) to sort out her feelings of inferiority and indentured servitude. More authorial coyness: her canine ophthalmologist is called Dr. Blinkmeister. And more (there is far too much coyness here): —Clara loves Saks because all the gay shoe salesmen appreciate an adorable pug and there’s a pet boutique on the ground floor with Versace leashes and a four-hundred-dollar iron four-poster bed that she feels she deserves.— Halfway through the book, with the meat now sliced pretty thin on the dog-joke front, Kaufman shifts her attention away from Clara and tells the saga of adopting her son, Nicholas, from a Siberian orphanage in a bureaucratic process so byzantine and angst-ridden that it makes Clara’s misbehavior seem pedestrian. Then it’s back to Clara again and how she eventually comes to accept Nicholas, which is a lucky thing: Readers may ponder who would have been given walking papers if they hadn’t hit it off. Inevitably, the jokes get stale. Do you wonder why Kaufman doesn’t just trade the thankless beasts for a Lab and get on with her life?

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-679-45261-3

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Villard

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998

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TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.

Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955

ISBN: 0670717797

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955

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IN MY PLACE

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

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