Delightful and informative reminiscences of one man’s life with his pet owl.
The life of a man and his feathered friend.
Though owls are not common pets, Osprey Publishing military editor Windrow (Our Friends Beneath the Sands, 2012, etc.) developed a 15-year friendship with a tawny owl that lived in his apartment. Needing a companion after a sky diving accident, the author first tried a little owl; however, this bird escaped, so he tried a tawny owl. Right from the start, Mumble, as Windrow called his female tawny, proved to be the perfect friend. Using notes and photographs from their time together, the author intertwines anecdotes of living in a small apartment with a bird the size of a loaf of bread with the evolution, zoology and social life of owls, providing readers with lots of information not normally found outside of bird identification books. One favorite experience Windrow remembers fondly is how Mumble loved to snuggle into his neck after his shower. “Her head and neck smelt delicious—clean, warm, wooly, and sort of…biscuit,” he writes. “If I stopped nuzzling her for even a moment she squeaked insistently, shoving her face upwards. She loved it when I rubbed the close triangle of short feathers immediately above her beak and between her eyes.” Due to his desire for this friendship, Windrow was willing to cover the apartment with plastic and newspapers for the inevitable “strongly acidic, foul-smelling brown-and-white sludge” and provide whole baby chicks for Mumble’s food, which she tore at with great pleasure—such eccentricities made the author’s friends question his sensibilities. Rich in minutiae enveloped by a sense of fondness for this affectionate bird, Windrow’s tale is unusual and endearing and takes the idea of an animal/human friendship to new heights.
Delightful and informative reminiscences of one man’s life with his pet owl.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-22846-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
PROFILES
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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