A serviceable story of inspiration and the love between a boy and his pet.
A boy and his dog, finding new ways to encourage each other past their limitations.
We haven’t quite reached the point where bookstores have their own section for print versions of YouTube videos, but with hours of video being uploaded every second, there’s certainly no shortage of source material. While many videos become popular for esoteric reasons bewildering to anyone over the age of 20, some touch on a desire to see pockets of goodness in a world beset with bad news. One such video, viewed more than 2 million times, reminds us of the power of the connection between pets and people. Owen was an 8-year-old boy with a rare genetic disorder in which muscles are unable to relax after they contract. This can result in near paralysis, with muscles constantly overworked and difficult to control. Haatchi was an Anatolian dog named after a famous Japanese dog that returned to the same train station stop for years after his master had died, waiting for his master to disembark from the train. In January 2012, Haatchi was hit over the head and left to die on a train track; the train took one of his legs and most of his tail, but he managed to survive. His limitations made it difficult for him to interact with other dogs; Owen’s challenges made almost everything difficult for him. Together, they have been able to push past physical limitations to find new strength and satisfaction. Holden (Gifted and Talented, 2012, etc.) does an adequate job fleshing out the details of Owen’s treatments and Haatchi’s gradual ability to trust humans again, but she provides too much detail about the fame that Owen and Haatchi have found—e.g., receiving awards, giving a signature to Queen guitarist Brian May, etc.
A serviceable story of inspiration and the love between a boy and his pet.Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-06318-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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