With Americans owning more dogs than any other country in the world, this sprightly, entertaining travelogue should find a...
Man and dog take to the road.
Hoping to “celebrate the breadth of human-dog relationships in contemporary life,” journalist Denizet-Lewis (Writing and Publishing/Emerson Coll.; American Voyeur: Dispatches from the Far Reaches of Modern Life, 2010, etc.) chronicles a four-month trip with his Labrador mix, Casey. In a small RV, the two traveled from Provincetown, Rhode Island, to Florida, across the South, through the Midwest to California and back. Along the way, Denizet-Lewis met show dogs and strays, police dogs and pampered pets, and he visited with dog rescuers, trainers, groomers, whisperers, masseurs, photographers and healers. He talked with people suffering from cynophobia (fear of dogs) and others who claimed they could communicate with dogs and translate their messages to humans. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the author visited with dog-loving writer Amy Hempel, who advocates for shelter dogs and pit bulls, which are rarely adopted. Shelter workers tell him that black dogs, also, are hard to place. “Many people subconsciously overlook them,” one shelter worker told Denizet-Lewis, a phenomenon she calls Black Dog Syndrome. The author’s saddest encounter with dogs occurred on a Navajo reservation, where strays abound, and teenagers run over dogs just for sport. From there, Denizet-Lewis left with a new companion, whom he named Rezzy. In North Carolina, he met Rob, an owner of wolfdogs, a combination of wolf and, in this case, Husky. Rob told him that wolves “are shy and misunderstood,” “independent” and “smart as hell,” although they are not affectionate. Unconditional love, though, is what most dog owners desire. The author discovered that whether dogs are capable of love is a subject of much controversy. Some neuroscientists argue that canines do feel love; others think dogs are interested more in treats than in human companionship.
With Americans owning more dogs than any other country in the world, this sprightly, entertaining travelogue should find a delighted readership.Pub Date: July 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4391-4693-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
