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HAVE DOG, WILL TRAVEL

Name: HAVE DOG, WILL TRAVEL
Author: Stephen Kuusisto
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8979-2

A POET'S JOURNEY WITH AN EXCEPTIONAL LABRADOR

by Stephen Kuusisto ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 13, 2018

An eloquent and heartwarming memoir.

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A poet/memoirist’s account of how he bonded with his first guide dog.

Kuusisto (Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening, 2006, etc.) was born with exceptionally poor vision. However, because his mother and father believed he would have no future if he presented as blind, they “forcefully encouraged me to do absolutely everything sighted children did.” He went to school, attended college, and became a professor, all without learning Braille. But his world was also extremely circumscribed: the one thing he could not manage was travel outside of his small town. “I was a second rate traveler who didn’t know how to go places independently,” he writes. When, at age 38, he lost his teaching job, Kuusisto was forced to reckon with circumstances that demanded he change not only his lifestyle, but also his attitude toward being physically imperfect. His path led him to Guiding Eyes for the Blind, an organization that helps visually impaired people become more mobile by using guide dogs. The author began training with a “brilliant and silly” yellow Labrador named Corky, who had “the most comprehending face I’d ever met.” Over the span of a few months, he learned how to control Corky and feel the “dog-man confidence” that allowed him to move through public spaces with her. At the same time, Corky also forced Kuusisto to come face to face with a suppressed part of his identity. Gradually, he integrated the stubborn survivor he was with the new, “more refined man of the street” able to navigate urban mazes like New York City with ease. Most significantly, the author was able to leave behind the disability prejudices he had inherited from his parents and honor his own right to live an authentic life free of guilt and shame for being “deficient.” Kuusisto tells the poignant story of a midlife rebirth that led to self-acceptance and also celebrates human/animal interdependence and a “companionship [that] was intimate and richer than poems.”

An eloquent and heartwarming memoir.

Pub Date: March 13, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-4516-8979-2

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)