A scattershot but edgy memoir, marked by wit and poignancy.
A veterinarian reflects on a life enriched by horses, cats, and dogs in this debut memoir.
Carlson grew up in Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago, but in 1968, when she was 15, she visited her adored uncle, Tom, in Fort Collins, Colorado, and became smitten with the West. She later attended Colorado State University and received her degree in teaching physical education. During her senior year, she met her future husband, Earl, then in his freshman year at the veterinary college. Inspired by Earl’s example, she went back to school to acquire the science credits necessary to apply to the veterinary school; later, she began the training that would lead to her opening an all-feline private veterinary practice in Fort Collins. However, the heart of her story rests with the animals—particularly those who were part of her own family, from her first cat, Pruney, to her most recent dog, Ivy, as well as a series of beloved horses. Two of these horses, Franny and Marcie, were inseparable to the degree that they had to be ridden together to remain calm. In a momentary lapse of judgment, Carlson took Marcie out alone: “All of a sudden, while standing still, Marcie bucked just once, and I flew off into outer space...then she bolted and ran off through the streets of Fort Collins.” Earl later found Marcie at home; she’d returned to Franny. Plenty of other animal antics are on full, delightful display throughout these pages—and so is the pain of losing them, always affectingly related by the author. There’s also considerable space devoted to the rigors of veterinary school, as well as Carlson’s endurance of and recovery from hip surgery. Throughout the book, she pulls no punches when relating difficulties that she’s faced over the years, including her discord with members of her late husband’s family. She compensates for some confusing chronological whipsawing during the early chapters with an engaging overall narrative, which includes numerous tales of other people’s four-legged companions.
A scattershot but edgy memoir, marked by wit and poignancy.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-431-8
Page Count: 273
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2018
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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