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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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