An entertaining, if unfocused, read that will be most enjoyed by devoted cat lovers.
A debut collection of essays, poems and thoughts about cats by an author who’s worked as an animal rights lobbyist, cat groomer, animal control board member, veterinary technician, shelter worker and therapy-cat trainer.
Clifford has had a special relationship with cats since childhood. One of her first words was “cat,” and her father took her to a shelter to adopt her first feline when she was only 4. She doesn’t reveal how many cats she’s taken in over the years, but she affectionately refers to her “feline crew” as a “thundering herd.” The author clearly has a unique way with animals, and her pieces here range from lighthearted notes about cats who play fetch to tender reflections about animals who have died. Her range of experiences working with animals includes treating cats with such special needs as deafness and diabetes, and she writes informative chapters detailing the challenges and rewards of caring for them. At over 300 pages, however, the collection eventually feels a bit scattered; chapters are not presented in chronological order, and stories from the author’s early years are interspersed with sections from later periods of her life. As such, the book might have been more focused as a straightforward memoir. Many stories are only a page or two long, and with so many cats mentioned in the book, some of the chapters may start to run together. Some are more anecdotal and less satisfying than others, such as “Things Broken,” in which Clifford becomes angry after breaking a dish and realizes that she was actually upset about the recent death of her Abyssinian. However, “Yes, I Promise!,” about Clifford’s father using his lunch money to buy her first purebred cat, is particularly moving.
An entertaining, if unfocused, read that will be most enjoyed by devoted cat lovers.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2012
ISBN: 978-1479740550
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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