A tender tribute to the author’s father, sure to please fans of Trout’s previous two pet-focused books.
Veterinarian surgeon Trout (Love Is the Best Medicine, 2009, etc.) writes about his father and the pets they shared in this loving, humorous memoir.
Growing up in a working-class British suburb, the author longed for a dog of his own. With encouragement from his frequently unemployed father, he lobbied his mother, who at first adamantly opposed adding another mouth to the family. Success came after a wave of neighborhood break-ins demonstrated the advantages of a having a watch dog at home. So Patch, a part–German shepherd puppy, joined the family. Despite Trout’s love for Patch, the dog primarily bonded with his father. The author describes his initial jealousy: “I was the friend who got him the introduction and now I was the one getting dumped.” Patch proved to be rambunctious and difficult to control but much beloved. Trips to the vet were especially difficult, even though the doctor took Patch’s excitability in stride. Trout’s father settled into a career as an electrician, but he always desired a country life. The author discovered that along with his love of animals, he had a predilection for science. When he expressed an interest in possibly becoming a veterinarian, his father was so enthusiastic that he began flooding the house with books by James Herriot and TV episodes of All Creatures Great and Small. Stranger still, his father began adopting the fictional Herriot’s mannerisms, dress and Yorkshire way of speech. A succession of family pets followed Patch, and Trout embarked on the challenging path of becoming a veterinary surgeon, eventually relocating to the United States, where he married and started his own family. Sadly, he began to realize that although he always had his father's unconditional support, he was disappointed that his son did not follow in the footsteps of Herriot and become a country veterinarian.
A tender tribute to the author’s father, sure to please fans of Trout’s previous two pet-focused books.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7679-3200-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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