An emotional ride for pet lovers that provides some valuable instruction on citizen action and kindness.
Debut author Ray tells the story of what she calls one of the largest dog rescues in American history, when animal lovers in Montana united to save more than 100ill-treated canines from a vagrant breeder.
The author was living in Butte, Montana, in the fall of 2008, when a school bus driven by a drifter broke down within the city limits. A local custodian sounded an alarm over its contents: more than 100 large dogs, mostly white German shepherds and huskies. They were crammed in and living in filthy conditions, as part of the driver’s misguided scheme to use them as Iditarod sled-pullers in Alaska. After the man was arrested by police for animal cruelty, city animal control officers seemed unable to solve the dog problem, so concerned residents created “Camp Husky,” a grass-roots emergency service for caring for the diseased, frightened canines. Many of the female dogs were pregnant, so the team soon had some 200 dogs to place with new owners. Ray pays tribute to the volunteers behind Camp Husky and also takes whacks at the bureaucrats of the city’s Animal Services, portraying them as people who simply didn’t want to do their jobs and who had a number of the dogs summarily killed, claiming inaccurately that they were wolf or coyote hybrids. The bulk of the book is sentimental in tone, providing an anthology of tales of particular, adopted dogs, their rehabilitations from trauma and sicknesses, and the affections they ultimately had for their new owners (although, sometimes, initial adoptions didn’t work out). This anecdotal material, however, tends to overshadow the book’s theme of how DIY action worked when government action didn’t. Also, Ray doesn’t strongly weigh in on the controversy regarding the use of pet-breeding enterprises when shelters are overfilled with animals. Her closing chapter, though, effectively widens the scope of the book to argue for improved animal welfare and humanitarianism across the spectrum—and few will argue with that.
An emotional ride for pet lovers that provides some valuable instruction on citizen action and kindness.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5173-5752-8
Page Count: 294
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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