A warm and heartfelt memoir perfect for fans of the author’s first two dog-focused books.
A bestselling author tells the very personal story of how and why she became involved in lost animal search and rescue missions.
Charleson’s (The Possibility Dogs: What a Handful of "Unadoptables" Taught Me About Service, Hope, and Healing, 2013, etc.) dog Puzzle had long worked by her side searching for lost people or those who had been victims of catastrophe. Then the author brought home a Maltipoo rescue named Ace whose “dignified, shabby gentility” and last-minute rescue from euthanasia became a talking point for her and the parents she kept at arm's length. Despite a harrowing existence as a lost canine, Ace showed the marks of a dog who had once been loved; he also revealed a knack for locating lost pets. Charleson familiarized herself with the tactics of lost animal search and began training Ace and Puzzle in on-the-ground location strategies. As she helped reunite pets with their owners, the author began recalling the life she had led with the parents who had “made me a rescuer.” Though they were deeply troubled, both shared a common bond in their love for animals that was so strong that they often spent beyond their limited means to save strays. But the author’s own life with the pet-loving parents who “had rarely been wonderful together” was difficult. The family moved often, and when Charleson was a teenager, her mother left to start a life on her own; after that, the three of them slowly drifted apart. In a touching twist of irony, the Maltipoo stray was the one who ultimately came to Charleson's rescue. Not only did he help heal the relationship with her parents; he also became a source of comfort when Puzzle and her parents eventually died. Moving and profound, Charleson’s book affirms the special human-animal connection and fully celebrates the healing powers of forgiveness and love.
A warm and heartfelt memoir perfect for fans of the author’s first two dog-focused books.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-99505-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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