An informative and sometimes eye-opening examination of natural remedies for helping your dog.
A guide to holistic health for pet dogs.
In her nonfiction debut, Hogan presents “an exploration of plant medicine mapped onto canine health and wellness,” offering an alternative to the familiar world of mass-produced kibble food and mass-prescribed veterinary medications. The author readily acknowledges the advances that veterinary medicine has made in diagnostics, surgery, and emergency medicine, but she applies the principles of holistic herbalism with the caveat that the one-size-fits-all approach of modern medicine sometimes overlooks things like environment, stressors, diet, and other factors. “Holistic herbalism sees dogs as individuals with unique needs, sensitivities, and energetic patterns,” she writes. Throughout the well-illustrated chapters on every aspect of canine physiology, Hogan touches on a wide array of health problems, including itchy skin, “hot spots,” nausea, fatty tumors, and even stings and bug bites. In every case, she explains the bodily systems involved—“the liver stores approximately 10 percent of your dog’s blood, filters the blood (along with the kidneys), and helps move fluids”—and adds a quick tip like, “The nervous system should be addressed in any pattern of kidney imbalance, and especially dryness.” The author’s calm narrative tone is both inviting and strategic, as is her opening endorsement of the standard veterinary medical practices upon which so many of her readers rely; Hogan’s approach will likely help to calm the suspicions of readers who feel that only a fanatic would recommend aloe vera and burdock root instead of an ultrasound scan for a dog’s painful abdomen. Even if skeptical readers don’t come away completely convinced, they’ll be enormously educated—Hogan imparts a huge amount of biological information about dogs, and does it all with an easy readability that will make quite a bit of it stick.
An informative and sometimes eye-opening examination of natural remedies for helping your dog.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781644119594
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Healing Arts Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.
The Nobel laureate’s singular aesthetics.
Award-winning novelist, essayist, and literary scholar Serpell offers a compelling elucidation of Toni Morrison’s notably challenging fiction, criticism, plays, and poetry. “There are passages in Morrison’s works,” she has found, “that no reader I’ve ever met understands on the first go.” The source of Morrison’s “famed difficulty,” as Serpell sees it, was not “her intersectional identity, her prickly personality, or her contrarian politics,” but rather her complicated and sophisticated understanding of Black aesthetics. Serpell’s subtle textual analysis of 11 novels, “Recitatif”—Morrison’s only published short story—and several essays, plays, and poems is enriched by her prodigious literary background and insights she has gleaned from archival sources: letters, diary entries, notes, and manuscripts. Morrison, she asserts, “refused for her work to be reduced to her race and her gender, or to be forced to fit the expectations foisted upon her as a result.” Tar Baby (1981), Morrison’s fourth novel, seems to Serpell the first time in the writer’s career that she “directly addressed the white/black dichotomy” with characters who “are avatars for race.” Serpell gives extensive attention to “Recitatif,” a story in which “all racial codes” are vanished, yet one in which “racial identity is crucial” to its characters. The story emerges as “a kind of asymmetrical, contrapuntal, alternative dialogue” between its two female protagonists, “between an individual voice and the instruments of the social world, or between the reader’s experience and the story’s unresolved chords—or codes.” Celebrating Morrison’s “masterful difficulty and superb wit,” “her inscrutable yet perfect metaphors,” and “her unaccountable rushes of imagination,” Serpell affords ample evidence that she was “a writer whose deliberate difficulty—personal, political, and literary—defied classification…and made for brilliance.”
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780593732915
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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