A tender, heartfelt story.
A 20-something’s memoir about the English mastiff that became her “best friend [and] so much more.”
Watt was a college sophomore when her mother took her to shop for a dog. Though “we promised ourselves we were just going to look,” by the time they drove home, they had bought an English mastiff puppy the author named Gizelle. She knew that the dog was intended to partially make up for her mother’s alcoholism, but she could not stop herself from falling in love with Gizelle, nor could she stop hoping that the dog was a sign that her “best friend” of a mother would finally get sober. Watt eventually took the dog to live with her while she attended the University of Tennessee, where Gizelle became her 160-pound running partner and protector. At 23, the desire to live in a place that was more “energetic, gritty [and] cosmopolitan” took Watt from Knoxville to Manhattan. After securing a small apartment, she took in Gizelle, whose size earned her names like “Cujo” and “Godzilla.” Watt then began working her way up from waitress to public relations assistant and found companionship with a good but dull man who never offered the same emotional satisfaction as Gizelle. As she watched her mother slip away from her and deeper into addiction, Watt discovered that her dog had bone cancer. Determined to make the remaining days of her canine best friend’s life count, she created a “bucket list” of all the things she wanted to experience with her dog before she died—e.g., riding in a boat together or “watch[ing] the snow fall on the beach.” As much a story about growing up as about letting go of things that cannot be changed, Watt’s book is also a reminder of the profound healing connection that can exist between humans and the pets they love.
A tender, heartfelt story.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2365-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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