A familiar story but canine lovers should find much to enjoy in the antics (and photos) of an incorrigible border collie.
A debut memoir chronicles life with a 2-year-old rescue dog from a New Jersey shelter.
In 2013, Casale, a newly graduated veterinarian, realized his dream of adopting a dog. Miles Murphy, originally abandoned in Kentucky, burst into the author’s life with every ounce of pent-up energy a border collie who has lived in a series of shelters could muster: “Like a stallion out of the gates at the Kentucky Derby,” Miles bolted “out of the kennel.” This sweet, irascible 45-pound scamp would change Casale’s life. The author and his girlfriend Sarah (now his wife) had made all the appropriate preparations for Miles, but as any dog parent knows, new canines will have plenty of ideas of their own. Within the first couple of hours, Miles scored a corncob from the garbage, which Casale managed to retrieve when it was halfway down the pooch’s throat. They quickly learned that Miles had serious separation anxiety. He destroyed everything in sight when he was left alone so they secured him in his crate when they departed for work. But Miles proved to be a clever guy. One night, the author returned home to find Miles “had pulled the quilt through the top grate so hard that it dislodged the latches that kept the front door attached to the roof of the crate...it was like a jail break.” Casale has assembled an articulate, upbeat collection of vivid vignettes that are intended to recapture, for the author as much as for the audience, those many moments that form the unique relationship between human and canine. Frustrations, anger, and fears are overwhelmed by unabashed love and joy. In his engaging account, which features family photographs of Miles, Casale is also on a mission to promote rescue adoptions: “I can’t help but think about how many shelter animals’ lives could improve if they were as fortunate to share the benefits that their” purebred counterparts “were lucky to have.” As he writes in his dedication: “A home is just a reader’s choice away.”
A familiar story but canine lovers should find much to enjoy in the antics (and photos) of an incorrigible border collie.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5320-3185-4
Page Count: 222
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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