An insightful affirmation of our love of animals.
A veterinarian who specializes in behavioral medicine examines the spiritual bond between humans and their pets.
In the early years of Virga’s career, when he specialized in emergency medicine, he was struck by the way his animal patients responded to the warmth of human contact. He experienced a life-changing moment while treating a dog in shock, and that led him to change his specialty. Exhausted, he slumped down beside the animal, and as the dog nuzzled against him, its vital signs improved. In the years that followed, Virga came to believe in the deep roots of our human connection to animals. “What I see in their eyes is my own reflection…we share much more than we recognize,” he writes. Two out of three Americans own pets, which they treat as members of their family, best friends and confidants. In addition to broadening our perspective, they “embrace a part of our human nature that's as vital to us as our hearts and minds.” Virga, who describes numerous instances from his practice, is convinced by his own experiences and modern research that “animals’ neurons are very much the same as ours, generating images, emotions, memories and thoughts.” That animal neuroses are also similar to those of humans—e.g., dogs with obsessive-compulsive disorder who obsessively bite their tails—is further proof. The kinship that we feel with animals, writes the author, “comes from our souls connecting with theirs.” They help us focus on the moment and experience the “heights of joy as well as heartwrenching depths of sorrow,” and they make us feel more connected to “the greater world in which we live.”
An insightful affirmation of our love of animals.Pub Date: July 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-71886-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
SHADOW CATEncountering the American Mountain LionEwing, Susan & Elizabeth Grossman—Eds.
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-57061-154-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Sasquatch
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
The beautifully drawn and affecting story of Schueler's (The Temple of the Jaguar, 1993, etc.) efforts to reclaim a devastated piece of the sandhills of Mississippi. Schueler, a white man, and Willie Brown, a black man and Schueler's mate, went searching for a rustic patch near their home base in New Orleans. They hadn't many bucks, so they sought the ``least worst land'' and found it in what became known as the Place, a logged-over parcel of 80 acres, rent and abused, but sporting wild meadows and swampy creeks, tupelo and slash and longleaf pine, and wonderfully archaic, almost alien, pitcher-plant bogs—in a word, it had promise. What follows is the long, meandering, and slow metamorphosis of the land: relocating plants from around the property, building a modest home and seeing it destroyed by 1969's Hurricane Camille and her 200-mph winds, building another home. It is a story of getting to know the land, its flora and fauna, its thankfully tolerant if sometimes vexing neighbors (one of them jacklit and shot one of Schueler's much- loved deer), its strange, storm-tossed weather. Most magical is just watching the changes wrought on the Place ``under the fullness of time,'' from a clear-cut moonscape to its rightful ecological niche. Schueler keeps his writing simple, direct, and clear as a bell, never stretching for a parable or torturing the landscape; rather, he delicately mines the endless seam of glorious, unexpected happenings that wait upon those who spend a good amount of time in a wild place and keep their eyes open. When Willie dies from AIDS in 1987, you can almost hear the land weep for the loss of such a friend. The sandhills are lucky to still have Schueler looking after a smattering of their acres.
Pub Date: Jan. 29, 1996
ISBN: 0-395-68997-X
Page Count: 283
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
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