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
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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