An inspiring collection of rescue tales ideal for dog lovers and armchair detectives.
The unique dynamic between man and “man’s best friend” is passionately explored by a search-and-rescue dog handler.
Dallas-area Rescue K9 Unit volunteer Charleson shares memories, information and anecdotes, each one representative of a stage in the progression of her police work. In the opening chapters, the author, who had been training for three consecutive years with a local search-and-rescue (SAR) team, trails alongside rescue dogs and their able handlers in cases like the desperate search for a missing child or rummaging through the debris from the disintegrated space shuttle Columbia. The author’s years of experience with the unit soon qualified her to “train and run beside a search dog.” She details her history as a flight instructor introduced to the rescue profession by circumstance and the bittersweet dissolution of her marriage. Soon after her qualification, Charleson accompanied her dog-in-training Puzzle, a bouncy Golden Retriever puppy, on an airline flight, much to the delight of passengers and crew alike. Puzzle’s breed, she notes, is notorious among dog-rescue circles for their “drive, stability, commitment to working with a human, congeniality, and nose.” As Puzzle matured, he began interacting well with the author’s own assortment of pets, but proved somewhat of a challenge at home. However, his intensive rescue training eventually calmed him down. The honing of supreme nose-driven skills, trailing and tracking capability, rappelling from heights, water and fire rescues and human-remains detection are all key abilities for Puzzle, yet Charleson also had to train herself with equal determination. While the common threads of canine companionship and humane compassion run consistently through the book, the author wisely grounds her journey in reality, writing that SAR work is serious business and “not a hobby or a Sunday pastime.”
An inspiring collection of rescue tales ideal for dog lovers and armchair detectives.Pub Date: April 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-547-15244-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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