Graphic scenes of animal torture make for a sometimes painful read, but the passion here can also make it worth the effort.
The author of several books on dog behavior offers her first novel: a sharp indictment against the use of dogs in animal research.
Animal behaviorist Viktor Hoffman, who studies the rare feral dog, discovers a pit bull that has been surviving on its own in the forest and sets about tracking the dog’s actions. Injured in the woods, Hoffman is rescued by the dog, which he names Damien. But that doesn’t stop him from later attaching a bulky radio collar to Damien that (unbeknownst to the researcher) severely inhibits the dog’s ability to hunt. Hoffman eventually finds Damien nearly starved, the collar wedged between rocks. Feeling a sense of obligation, he saves the dog’s life, but only for a fate worse than death: Hoffman brings Damien to his university’s animal research lab, albeit with a note attached preventing any terminal studies. Vividly depicting Damien’s lot as a research animal, the author catalogues one horror after another: he's shocked, shot, and left to linger in a small cage for the rest of his life. Enter Elizabeth Fletcher, a pre-med student working part-time in the lab as an animal handler. The daughter of a researcher who himself experiments on dogs, Elizabeth has never had a pet and can’t fathom any special connection between the two species . . . until she meets Damien. The dog’s nobility (Jessup waxes poetic about the breed a bit too often) intrigues her, and soon she is secretly taking him out at dawn for walks and teaching him tricks. Very special tricks: when Elizabeth teaches Damien how to speak, she gets him to actually articulate human words. Later, though, she inadvertently puts him into the hands of evil Dr. Seville, who intends to use Damien’s miraculous skill to build his reputation—at any cost.
Graphic scenes of animal torture make for a sometimes painful read, but the passion here can also make it worth the effort.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26662-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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