An uplifting story of hope about how both dogs and humans need "a sense that they are not helpless victims."
How training an incorrigible puppy helped an internationally renowned animal behaviorist recover from “multiple traumas.”
During her 25-year career, McConnell (For the Love of a Dog: Understanding Emotion in You and Your Best Friend, 2006, etc.) has trained both aggressive dogs "voicelessly telling me how frightened they were" and their owners, many of whom were unable to understand their pets' signals without her direction. As the author notes, throughout her career, she has “used science, art, and empathy to help ‘problem dogs’ have a voice; to listen to what they are trying to tell us and help them and their families be happy together.” She has always felt tremendous empathy for these “fearful, frightened dogs,” whose self-expressions were often misunderstood. McConnell explains how she could never let her guard down because she was scarred by painful events in her past, including sexual exploitation and witnessing a man fall to his death in front of her. She carried these scars into adulthood, resulting in a constant sense of hypervigilance; her “startle response,” she writes, was set to “PANIC.” Though she had her hands full living with three older dogs in varying states of frailty, she decided to adopt Will, a border collie puppy who was alternately a snuggler and a terror. She had no way of knowing for sure, but she believed that Will shared similar prior experiences of shock and trauma. Will gave the author firsthand knowledge that aggressive dogs are often fearful and misunderstood, and they don’t have a reliable method for expressing it. McConnell’s constant struggles to soothe Will finally gave her the courage to speak about her suffering and begin talk therapy and other methods of healing and relaxation. In addition to information sure to appeal to dog lovers, the author provides a compassionate account of the reclamation of her life from abuse and shame.
An uplifting story of hope about how both dogs and humans need "a sense that they are not helpless victims."Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5015-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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