Best for like-minded bird enthusiasts.
Free-spirited animal lover shares the ups and downs of five years spent rehabilitating injured birds from her Hudson Valley home.
Gilbert (Hawk Hill, 1996) admits she was always a misanthropic rebel—bouncing among schools and jobs and resenting authority, but enthralled by the dignity of animals. She worked at an animal hospital and volunteered at a raptor center for several years before becoming a home-based rehabber. Gilbert had a flight cage built, passed her federal permit exam and agreed to accept only recovering songbirds. The need for committed, qualified wildlife rehabilitators is so great, however, that she found herself taking on more birds than she could handle, largely out of guilt for the wrongs visited by “perverse” humans on the innocent avian population. She comically describes her house becoming a veritable circus of wild birds, with a great blue heron in the shower, grackles in the flight cage, a duckling in the living room and waxwings perched wherever there was room. (Westlake’s illustrations vividly convey the scene.) While Gilbert’s jealous pets, a yellow-collared macaw and an African grey parrot, waged war on the invading species, her patient family got used to seeing defrosted rats on top of the dryer or mealworms in the fridge. The author’s two children in particular add purpose and exuberance to her story. Readers will acquire education aplenty from Gilbert’s discussions of the creatures she encounters and the challenges rehabbers face in a world where more than 90 percent of wildlife injuries are the direct result of human activity. She excoriates ignorant owners who let domestic cats hunt birds for play, decries her perennial lack of funds and labor and describes working with vets to decide whether euthanasia or captivity is more humane. Gilbert is abrasive and funny, a crusader with little patience for those who do not share her concerns. She scants opportunities to transcend her topic and connect with readers on more relatable struggles like family balance, accepting limits and managing suffering.
Best for like-minded bird enthusiasts.Pub Date: March 2, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-156312-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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