An inspiring and refreshingly optimistic reminder about the untapped possibilities that exist in the relationships between...
The compassionate account of the author’s experiences with psychiatric service dogs.
For years, Charleson (Scent of the Missing: Love and Partnership with a Search-and-Rescue Dog, 2010) was a dedicated canine search-and-rescue professional. After a particularly “ugly” search in 2004, she was diagnosed with critical-incident stress by one doctor and PTSD by another. Before she could sink too far into mental illness, Puzzle, the golden retriever puppy she had been training as a search-and-rescue dog, “badgered [her] free” from the fear that was ruling her life. Charleson eventually learned that the demand was growing for canines with the ability to help and support people with mental and emotional problems. The expense involved in “raising, training and providing excellent care” for psychiatric service-dog candidates, however, made them too costly for many individuals. Determined to show that owners could teach suitable dogs to become their assistants, Charleson went into shelters to locate a dog with the resilience, intelligence and good nature necessary to do psychiatric service work and that she could train on her own. She found her candidate in a starving pit bull terrier puppy she named Jake Piper. Drawing on her encounters with many extraordinary psych service dogs and their handlers, as well as her own experiences with mental illness, Charleson trained Jake to distract her away from anxiety-based behaviors like compulsive stove checking. The story she tells about her dogs is remarkable, but those she includes about other canines—like Merlin, the black lab who could sense the onset of panic attacks, and Ollie, the blind and deaf terrier who brought comfort to anxious children—are equally amazing.
An inspiring and refreshingly optimistic reminder about the untapped possibilities that exist in the relationships between humans and dogs.Pub Date: June 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-547-73493-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Both entertaining and grippingly introspective, Haddish’s take-no-prisoners tale is a testament to self-will and how humor...
The stand-up comedian and actress opens up about her past and the perils of being a woman in comedy.
In her uncensored and often hilarious debut memoir, Haddish reveals pivotal events from her personal life that helped propel her toward the stage. “I got into the entertainment business so I could feel accepted,” she writes. “And loved. And safe.” After learning about the trials of her early years, readers will appreciate how trying to make a roomful of strangers laugh could prove easier than negotiating the minefield of the author’s home life. Though somewhat dismissive of her uncanny ability to rise above adversity, Haddish provides a colloquially written rags-to-riches story that is both impressive and harrowing. Abandoned by her father at age 3 and forced to live with her grandmother at 8, after her mother was in a devastating car accident that caused permanent brain damage, Haddish spent years taking care of her younger siblings or being abused while in foster care. She turned to humor as a defense mechanism, getting her comedic start as a teen working as an “energy producer” at bar mitzvahs around Los Angeles. Once her grandmother learned she would no longer receive financial support for caring for her granddaughter, she turned Haddish out, causing her to become homeless at 18. At 21, the author’s stepfather told her that not only was he responsible for the accident that had forever changed her mother, but that it had been meant to kill her and all her siblings so he could cash in on the life insurance. After learning this, Haddish says she started dating policemen. “It’s always good to have police friends,” she writes, “especially black police, because there aren’t a lot of them.” The author’s unrelenting positivity and openness about how insecurities about her own self-worth led to poor decisions later in life offer important lessons and hope for others seemingly trapped in toxic relationships.
Both entertaining and grippingly introspective, Haddish’s take-no-prisoners tale is a testament to self-will and how humor can save your life.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8182-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
He came home eventually, to do the “Survivor Shuffle” and miss Vietnam acutely, and he writes with a fierce, tight...
“Vietnam, man. Bomb ’em and feed ’em, bomb ’em and feed ’em”—a chopper pilot summarized the war strategy for Herr.
And with Herr’s belated volume of unfiled dispatches from the front, the awareness grows that this war—like no other since WWI—continues to produce a rich lode of literature, part litany, part exorcism, part macabre nostalgia. Like his buddies Scan Flynn and Dana Stone—later MIA in Cambodia—Herr was a correspondent with a license to see more than just a single mud hole. Using the “Airmobility” of the helicopters, he hopscotched the country from Hue to Danang to the DMZ to Saigon (“the subtle city war inside the war” where corruption stank like musk oil). He was at Hue during the battle that reduced the old Imperial capital to rubble, at Khe Sanh when the grunts’ expectations of another Alamo were running high. Between mortar shells and body bags he reflected on the mysterious smiles of the blank-eyed soldiers, smiles that said “I’ll tell you why I’m smiling, but it will make you crazy.” And Herr, who is full of twisted, hidden ironies, is all wrapped up in the craziness of the war, enthralled by the limitless “variety of deaths and mutilations the war offered,” and by the awful “cheer-crazed” language of the official communiques which always reported spirits high, weather fine. He knew, and his buddies knew, that this kind of reportage was “psychotic vaudeville”—though not for a moment would he deny the harsh glamour of being a working war correspondent.
He came home eventually, to do the “Survivor Shuffle” and miss Vietnam acutely, and he writes with a fierce, tight insistence that never lets go.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 1977
ISBN: 0679735259
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1977
BOOK REVIEW
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