A heartfelt tribute to animals and their extraordinary ability to love, learn, and teach.
A memoir by novelist Rose (Body Sharer’s, 1993) of the dogs she has known and loved—a celebration both of the animals themselves and of the lessons she learned from them.
As a child, Rose’s religious faith was shaken when the minister at her church told her that animals had no souls—an attitude that seemed to mock the love she felt for her fox terrier, Patches. A neighborhood character, Patches was only interested in Rose if she was “doing something new with her like teaching her to climb trees.” A deeply religious and thoughtful child, Rose felt she couldn’t love a God who didn’t love all creation, and her spiritual journey (she eventually became a Catholic) intensified after her marriage, when she and her husband acquired a border collie they named Kierney. Extremely high-strung and emotionally dependent on Rose, Kierney was also remarkably intelligent. She had a “vocabulary” of about 130 words (e.g., when told that her ball was in the bedroom, she’d head there directly), but she remained extremely insecure. She bit strangers and even attacked Rose (who was pregnant at the time). Worried, Rose took Kierney to a notoriously harsh obedience class, and for a while thereafter everything seemed okay. Six months after Rose’s daughter was born, however, Kierney began to experience epileptic seizures with increasing frequency, and barely two years later she died in Rose’s arms at the vet’s office. The finality of her death made Rose question the meaning of life even more, as she felt the “wind of universal malevolence.” Eventually, however, she acquired two other border collies, who also had a remarkable knack for understanding human speech. The author goes so far as to conclude that language itself may be God, insofar as it enables us to break down the bonds of individuality.
A heartfelt tribute to animals and their extraordinary ability to love, learn, and teach.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60692-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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