More maudlin than inspirational, though ardent dog lovers may be touched by certain scenes and find Kopp’s story satisfying.
A memoir that attempts to weave together two themes of deep interest to the author: her eating disorder and her love for dogs, especially pit bulls.
As a teenager, Kopp, an animal welfare advocate and novice writer, suffered from bulimia, bingeing and purging in an attempt to achieve the body she thought would make her lovable. Warning to readers with a low queasiness threshold: the author does not spare details of her disorder, recounting in full color hiding in bathrooms and shoving her fingers down her throat to induce vomiting. Woven into this growing-up part of her memoir are stories of her alcoholic father (“Dad wasn’t angry or unpredictable when he drank. He was angry and unpredictable when sober”) and of her own sexual misadventures. Kopp describes somewhat sketchily her experiences later at live-in rehab centers and at open support meetings for people with eating disorders, but she lavishes her greatest narrative attention on damaged or doomed dogs at animal shelters. Working first at an animal shelter in San Diego and then one in Los Angeles, the author discovered that the unconditional love of animals was the key to her redemption. Despite relapses, the author’s healing continued as her connection with shelter dogs grew. The emotional attachment between human and beast eventually led to recovery of her health and to her becoming an animal welfare activist, working to find loving homes for abandoned dogs. Pit bulls figure largely in her story, and an afterword features a plea for greater public understanding and acceptance of the breed (“my four-legged sanctuaries, my therapists, my healers, my beefy love-bugs…”). Unfortunately, the author’s writing chops leave much to be desired, and the narrative is often rambling and sometimes self-indulgent.
More maudlin than inspirational, though ardent dog lovers may be touched by certain scenes and find Kopp’s story satisfying.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237022-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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