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
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
