A tender lesson in courage and dependence.
Affectionate memoir about an SPCA rescue horse fostered by a lonely social worker.
Richards already owned three horses when she responded to a desperate plea from the SPCA asking for volunteers to foster abused mares and their foals. The mare she was given, Lay Me Down, was a lame, half-starved creature who “looked like a complicated wire coat hanger draped with a mud-caked brown pelt.” The trusting mare, who had been valued at $100,000 at the height of her racing career some 12 years earlier, now walked with a pronounced limp in both front legs, and had painful arthritis in both rear hocks. Despite her history of injuries and abuse, Lay Me Down retained an affable temperament that deeply impressed her new owner, herself a survivor of childhood and domestic abuse. A little romance even enters the picture when Richards’s gelding Hotshot courts the new arrival: “Their mutual attraction was instant and strong. . . . Together, they were a duet of contentment.” Inspired by Lay Me Down’s example, Richards decides to abandon her hermit-like ways and actually goes on a date: “If Lay Me Down could risk loving, so could I.” All too soon, Richards realizes something is wrong with her new equine charge. One of Lay Me Down’s eyes protrudes, and she is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. A trip to Cornell’s veterinary hospital confirms the worst, leaving Richards to cling to the hope that Lay Me Down, who had been imprisoned for years in a dark stall, live till spring, and bask once more in the sun’s warmth.
A tender lesson in courage and dependence.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-56947-419-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
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
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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