Being a stay-at-home dad, the father of four children and the primary caregiver for an assortment of pets, including two mini-pigs, may not be everyone's cup of tea, but this intrepid British author lived to tell the tale.
Whyman (Goldstrike, 2010, etc.), whose fiction tends toward dark tales of adventure and mayhem, also writes advice columns for young people. In this humorous chronicle of a year in the life of a London family transplanted to a rural suburb, the author describes his misadventures as a stay-at-home dad responsible for the care of two adolescent daughters, a young son and daughter, a ferocious Canadian sheep dog, assorted chickens, a cat and the two pigs. Adding mini-pigs to the family had seemed to be a fun idea. Whyman explains that reportedly the pigs were highly sociable and were “one of the smartest species on the planet after humans, chimps, and dolphins.” The expectation was that they would be easy house pets, but reality proved otherwise. Although they were smaller than ordinary pigs, they quickly grew too large to keep in the house. Not easily house-trained, the pigs ate the remote controls on the video-game console and raided the kitchen looking for food. Despite protests from his children, Whyman insisted that they be kept outdoors, but containing them created another set of problems as they raided the hen house for eggs, dug up the lawn and broke through fences. According to the author's account, his series of mishaps ended only when he took the advice of a helpful local farmer and accepted that his pets were indeed barnyard animals. They ultimately became less destructive, but they did not evince empathetic or other qualities characteristic of chimps and dolphins. While the author successfully milks his account for laughs, animal lovers may be disappointed.
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-1828-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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