A charming tale of a resilient donkey and a community’s love.
An abused animal gets a new life.
Raised in captivity by a man who could not care for the animals he hoarded, one donkey was left in shocking condition. When McDougall (Natural Born Heroes: How a Daring Band of Misfits Mastered the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance, 2015, etc.) first saw the animal, he could hardly believe his eyes: Penned in a cramped stall, mired knee-deep in manure, it had hooves so neglected and overgrown that it could hardly walk. “His muscles were withered,” writes the author, “his body was sagging and soft, his trust was severely damaged if not altogether lost.” McDougall agreed to take the donkey—renamed Sherman—to his home in rural Pennsylvania, but he had little hope that the animal would live. Equines need to walk in order for their intestines to digest food; if they are hobbled, McDougall learned, “waste matter blocks their guts until the animal is torn apart from the inside.” Fortunately for Sherman, the author was surrounded by caring neighbors who swooped in to help. One amateur horseman sawed off Sherman’s excess hooves; his wife, who raised donkeys, horses, a goat, and a pig, sheered away matted fur and gave the animal a thorough shampoo. She also advised that the donkey needed to have a job—a sense of purpose. For McDougall, that had to involve movement, which he believed was “big medicine; it’s the signal to every cell in our bodies that no matter what kind of damage we’ve suffered, we’re ready to rebuild and move away from death and back toward life.” Like humans, the author discovered, animals “are hungry for a challenge.” Against great odds, he decided to train Sherman to enter a world championship burro race. Sherman’s transformation from dying donkey to confident runner involved a circle of family, friends, neighbors, and a few feisty donkeys, each of whom McDougall portrays in affectionate, vivid detail. For several of them, suffering from their own emotional pain and trauma, Sherman proved a source of solace and support.
A charming tale of a resilient donkey and a community’s love.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-3236-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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