Sincere and at times even lyrical, but not especially compelling.
Novelist and memoirist Vandenburgh (Architecture of the Novel, 2010, etc.) tells the story of her relationships with two family dogs while exploring her own inner emotional landscapes.
Whistler came into the author’s uprooted life after she and her husband moved to Washington, D.C., from California. But the English springer spaniel soon went from being "two warm and fluffy handfuls of the purest joy" to "a fearful mass of jitters." Vandenburgh attributed the nervousness to his pedigreed background, until she realized that he may have been picking up and mirroring her own anxieties. Living apart from all she had known, including her own teenage children, she felt fearful, lonely and as though "[she'd] lost some element in [her] sense of cosmic usefulness." The author began seeing a therapist and then took Whistler to a trainer to help him overcome his problems. “Thousands of dollars” later, her dog evolved into an excellent companion upon whom she and her husband doted. When Whistler died tragically, the grief-stricken couple immediately adopted a puppy from an animal shelter and named him Thiebaud. From the start, this new dog seemed to revel in the simple joy of being alive. Vandenburgh and her husband eventually moved back to California, where Thiebaud shattered their fragile, hard-won peace by unexpectedly attacking another dog and plunging the family into conflict with the town's residents. Vandenburgh’s work is strongest in its depiction of the sometimes-intense, life-changing bonds that can form between humans and dogs. A lack of sustained reflection on the author’s internal conflicts, however, undermines the narrative’s impact on readers.
Sincere and at times even lyrical, but not especially compelling.Pub Date: April 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1619021204
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
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
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