A deceptively simple but powerful account of family bonds, friendship and the special relationship we share with dogs.
Former journalist Luttrell had yet to find a replacement for a much-loved dog when a chance encounter with a service dog–in-training in a local supermarket changed her life.
The author describes how she mourned the loss of her dog and anxiously anticipated empty-nest syndrome as her two children approached college age. The young man leading the dog was a weekend volunteer with the National Education for Assistance Dog Services, an organization that places puppies in prisons. Specially selected inmates raise the dogs and train them for a wide range of tasks: turning on lights, pushing elevator buttons, alerting the hearing impaired to alarms, acting as a companion to autistic children and more. During the week, the dogs share a cell with their handlers, but on weekends, they are housed with volunteers who introduce them to more challenging, chaotic environments such as shopping malls and city streets. Luttrell relates her decision to embark on the program with support from her husband and children. Daisy was introduced into the family, and, over the next 16 months, morphed from an adorable Lab puppy who feared loud noises to a trained companion for an autistic young man. At first half hoping that the lovable puppy would fail to make the grade and remain with her, Luttrell gradually became committed to her success. The author explains that learning to anticipate and respond to Daisy's signals helped her become “a better, more patient mother,” and her desire to see Daisy succeed helped her deal with her separation anxiety. Each weekend, the author would pick up and then return Daisy to the prison, and she and her inmate training partner would share experiences. Her growing realization of the importance of the program in the prisoner’s life provides another thread to the narrative.
A deceptively simple but powerful account of family bonds, friendship and the special relationship we share with dogs.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8623-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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