Ardent dog lovers will be inspired by Morie’s dedication, but neither the story nor the prose is compelling enough to reach...
Journalist/novelist Sherrill (The Ruins of California, 2006, etc.) chronicles a man’s quest to save a nearly extinct native Japanese dog.
One of the earliest known species, Akita hunting dogs have long been revered in Japan as cornerstones of national culture, symbols of loyalty and pride. In the years following World War I, when Morie Sawataishi was growing up in the remote snow country, Akitas were plentiful. By the final years of World War II, as the navy veteran returned to the snow country with his young wife, Kitako, he found the breed nearly gone; Akitas had been trapped and killed for fur to line the officers’ uniforms. Morie was in the tiny village of Hachimantai to supervise the construction of hydroelectric plants for Mitsubishi. Life there was rustic and isolated. Kitako worked most of the day just keeping the fire stoked and the rice cooking; she longed for her family in Tokyo. Far from a doctor, the couple lost two of their six children to illness. But from the moment he acquired his first Akita in 1944, Morie’s primary attention was devoted to his dogs. Over the years, he raised hundreds of Akitas, lavishing them with rare affection and tender care. Among the most notable were Three Good Lucks, who won countless dog shows, and Homan, who fathered generations of puppies. Morie’s breeding, along with that of fellow enthusiasts, bolstered the population and made them popular again. Along with the dogs came a series of colorful characters, including a nomadic hunter who bonded with the couple and an Akita-obsessed X-ray technician who became Morie’s favorite trainer. As the century progressed, the snow country became more civilized, getting a hospital, electricity and high-speed trains, much to Kitako’s delight. But having spent a lifetime with Morie and the dogs, she had also begun to appreciate the value of the land and of the animals her husband helped to protect. Sherrill presents an interesting slice of life, but her writing is simplistic and her plotting lacks focus.
Ardent dog lovers will be inspired by Morie’s dedication, but neither the story nor the prose is compelling enough to reach beyond this specific audience.Pub Date: March 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59420-124-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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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