A fervent, anecdotal memoir infused with heart, compassion, and a natural love for animals on every page.
Affecting dispatches from the life of an animal doctor.
Fincham-Gray, who has had a successful career in both Europe and the United States, recalls growing up just walking distance from an animal clinic on the Welsh border where she volunteered and groomed her career aspirations. Despite a childhood spent without a family pet, her love of animals flourished thanks in part to her father, a veterinary lab microbiologist who generously shared an appreciation for science with her. Overcoming an allergy to horses, insecurities at university, and demanding anatomy classes, she excelled at veterinary school and realized her dream. In this affably written amalgam of pedagogic and heartwarming material, the author chronicles her early years as a medical professional, particularly the culture shock of learning American vet medicine throughout her internship and the unique animals she encountered along the way. Readers meet emergency room patients like Missy, the tortoiseshell cat who was impaled by an arrow, and Tiger, who was saddled with a severe bladder blockage but managed to recover and thrive. Fincham-Gray also writes about how she endured the crushing heartbreak of euthanizing a dog with terminal pancreatitis and bidding farewell to her own aging cat. Once separated from the “protective custody of academia,” the author worked in private practices on both the East and West coasts. She discusses how she cured a septic Irish wolfhound named Grayling, a Mexican-born canine who’d contracted “the oldest continuously surviving cancer in nature,” and Sweetie, a young pit bull terrier whose diagnosis and patient care are the most complicated in the book, medically, financially, and emotionally. Fincham-Gray also imparts cautionary information on the medical consequences of obese pets. Pet fanatics and animal lovers in general will savor these bittersweet stories exploring the enduring human-animal bond.
A fervent, anecdotal memoir infused with heart, compassion, and a natural love for animals on every page.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9818-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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