A sentimental but often captivating New Age tribute to the soulfulness of animals.
Intimations of immortality flow from life on a horse farm in this passionate debut memoir.
Rowland boarded and trained horses on his Kentucky farm, and he discusses the intense emotional ties he formed with animals there. Pride of place goes to equines like Buffy, “an old soul in a horse body,” who injured herself and was put down, and Pal, a horse so beloved by all that Rowland glimpsed the ghost of Pal’s former owner visiting him. Other companions whom he mourns include Whiskers, a barn cat, and Sarge, a golden retriever. Both “crossed over the rainbow bridge” to await reunion with him in the afterlife. Even a passing bee conveyed a message: Rowland stroked the bee after it landed on him and received “an intense feeling of peace and love for the world.” Rowland sets these stories against his own narrative of spiritual awakening amid health crises, including multiple myeloma. He presents a harsh but conflicted critique of Western medicine, blaming much of his ill health on drugs with toxic side effects. He prefers alternative medicine, including treatments he got from a naturopath, a reiki practitioner, and a psychic, and he recommends an organic diet, rigorously filtered water, meditation, and using the Law of Attraction, which helps him avoid red lights while driving. Rowland’s evocative prose brings animals and their antics to life—the slobbery Sarge was “the farm greeter, which is like being a Wal-Mart greeter only wetter”—while drawing larger lessons from them. Some of these scenes can seem glib—“What is supposed to happen will happen, one way or another,” he concludes after rescuing a chipmunk from Whiskers only to watch the rodent escape and unwittingly run back into the cat’s clutches—but other are deeply felt and moving. “Her eyes once again went to mine ever so briefly,” he writes of Buffy’s death vigil, “as if to tell me she knew and she understood her time in this physical world was coming to an end. Then she called to Peanut, and in that soft murmuring sound mares only make to their foals, she apparently said her good-byes.” Readers who have felt a bond with an animal will appreciate Rowland’s experiences.
A sentimental but often captivating New Age tribute to the soulfulness of animals.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4525-8427-0
Page Count: 222
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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