Not just for dog lovers; a passionate reminder of the wonders of Yellowstone and its inhabitants at a time when our national...
Caffrey (Just Imagine: A New Life On An Old Boat, 2008) recounts the story of the heartwarming rescue effort undertaken to save one feisty, independent, and traumatized puppy in Yellowstone National Park.
David Sowers and his new girlfriend, Laura Gillice, both from Denver, were in Yellowstone with their young Australian shepherds (Aussies), a break intended to give the dogs a chance to bond and Laura and David an opportunity to see whether their own relationship had potential. Their car was struck head-on by a pickup truck. After rescuers sent David and Laura to the hospital, park rangers set about removing their dogs from the back of the SUV. They leashed 10-month-old Laila and brought her out of her crate, but when they went for Jade, her plastic crate fell apart, and Jade made a high-spirited run into the woods. The next day, David (with several broken fingers, a shattered kneecap, and a few cracked ribs) and Laura returned to the accident scene, looking for Jade. So began a search that would last 44 days and enlist the support of hundreds of park workers and volunteers. The previous record for survival of a lost domestic dog in Yellowstone was two weeks. Drawing on personal interviews, Caffrey captures the torment of Jade’s family each time the pup is sighted, only to disappear once again. Her secondary-source research adds a wealth of information about Yellowstone and the challenges posed by the intimidating wildlife that call the park home—wolf packs, grizzly bears, coyotes, and bison. Detours into the back stories of Laura, David, and Kat Brekken (a park reservationist who worked tirelessly to keep the search active) add poignancy, dimension, and context to an already remarkable tale. Straightforward, unadorned prose is engrossing enough to keep readers turning the pages.
Not just for dog lovers; a passionate reminder of the wonders of Yellowstone and its inhabitants at a time when our national parks are being threatened.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-979469-95-1
Page Count: 226
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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