A quick, cheerful holiday read.
With unwavering faith in her Creator and help from newfound friends, plucky Hennelie hamster escapes abuse to search for a better life in the beautiful Bushveld of Africa.
Newcomer Ziehl’s sweet—but predictable—Christmas tale begins in a pet store in Harare, Zimbabwe. A spoiled boy and girl relentlessly plead with their grandmother to purchase two hamsters, who are then plopped into a small, cold cage and named Hennelie and Harry. The hamsters end up in a farmhouse, and their cage is left in a depressing, windowless room. For Hennelie, the worst thing of all is sharing the cage with hateful Harry, as he torments and physically abuses her. To make matters worse, Hennelie is pregnant (Harry is the father), and she fears for her babies’ lives. Summoning up her courage and faith, Hennelie squeezes through the cage bars and makes her way outside, a place also rife with dangers for a hamster, such as the infamous “serial killer,” Wild Cat. Farm animals help Hennelie find the security gate leading to the world beyond the farm, where she eventually traverses the glorious African Bushveld in search of a home before her babies arrive. Author Ziehl encourages the entire family to partake in her optimistic message of perseverance during hardship, but older children could navigate the simplistic text on their own. Though the story has a strong theme of faith that echoes biblical verse, an underlying theme is faith in the self. For example, during a dark time when Hennelie is losing hope, a helpful horse encourages her to think of all she has accomplished. The book could also serve as a lesson in helping others, caring for pets and having respect for wild animals. Hennelie’s journey and the conclusion are somewhat pedestrian and hardly surprising, but a couple of colorful regional characters are introduced—e.g., the chongololo (giant African millipede)—and a kindly owl’s lecture on trees, plants and flowers paints a short but pleasant portrait of the landscape.
A quick, cheerful holiday read.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-1478240952
Page Count: 80
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Honest messages from one of America's best known women.
A compilation of advice from the Queen of All Media.
After writing a column for 14 years titled “What I Know For Sure” for O, The Oprah Winfrey Magazine, Winfrey brings together the highlights into one gift-ready collection. Grouped into themes like Joy, Resilience, Connection, Gratitude, Possibility, Awe, Clarity and Power, each short essay is the distilled thought of a woman who has taken the time to contemplate her life’s journey thus far. Whether she is discussing traveling across the country with her good friend, Gayle, the life she shares with her dogs or building a fire in the fireplace, Winfrey takes each moment and finds the good in it, takes pride in having lived it and embraces the message she’s received from that particular time. Through her actions and her words, she shows readers how she's turned potentially negative moments into life-enhancing experiences, how she's found bliss in simple pleasures like a perfectly ripe peach, and how she's overcome social anxiety to become part of a bigger community. She discusses the yo-yo dieting, exercise and calorie counting she endured for almost two decades as she tried to modify her physical body into something it was not meant to be, and how one day she decided she needed to be grateful for each and every body part: "This is the body you've been given—love what you've got." Since all of the sections are brief and many of the essays are only a couple paragraphs long—and many members of the target audience will have already read them in the magazine—they are best digested in short segments in order to absorb Winfrey's positive and joyful but repetitive message. The book also features a new introduction by the author.
Honest messages from one of America's best known women.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1250054050
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Flatiron View Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A lucid (in the sky with diamonds) look at the hows, whys, and occasional demerits of altering one’s mind.
Building on his lysergically drenched book How to Change Your Mind (2018), Pollan looks at three plant-based drugs and the mental effects they can produce.
The disastrous war on drugs began under Nixon to control two classes of perceived enemies: anti-war protestors and Black citizens. That cynical effort, writes the author, drives home the point that “societies condone the mind-changing drugs that help uphold society’s rule and ban the ones that are seen to undermine it.” One such drug is opium, for which Pollan daringly offers a recipe for home gardeners to make a tea laced with the stuff, producing “a radical and by no means unpleasant sense of passivity.” You can’t overthrow a government when so chilled out, and the real crisis is the manufacture of synthetic opioids, which the author roundly condemns. Pollan delivers a compelling backstory: This section dates to 1997, but he had to leave portions out of the original publication to keep the Drug Enforcement Administration from his door. Caffeine is legal, but it has stronger effects than opium, as the author learned when he tried to quit: “I came to see how integral caffeine is to the daily work of knitting ourselves back together after the fraying of consciousness during sleep.” Still, back in the day, the introduction of caffeine to the marketplace tempered the massive amounts of alcohol people were drinking even though a cup of coffee at noon will keep banging on your brain at midnight. As for the cactus species that “is busy transforming sunlight into mescaline right in my front yard”? Anyone can grow it, it seems, but not everyone will enjoy effects that, in one Pollan experiment, “felt like a kind of madness.” To his credit, the author also wrestles with issues of cultural appropriation, since in some places it’s now easier for a suburbanite to grow San Pedro cacti than for a Native American to use it ceremonially.
A lucid (in the sky with diamonds) look at the hows, whys, and occasional demerits of altering one’s mind.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-29690-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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