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
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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