Dog-lovers who found Marley & Me too saccharine will welcome this darker-hued appreciation of a canine friend.
Glasgow-based novelist Healy makes his U.S. debut with an ode to his dog, “a gift from God, to keep me in the world.”
The author spent his early adult years roaming around Scotland, drinking, brawling, writing short stories, drinking, generally batching it, and, oh yes, drinking. Then, on a lark, he adopted a Doberman named Martin. This slender volume, marked by blunt, unadorned prose, is a paean to the dog whose devotion and dependence transformed his life. Healy got serious about earning money, so that he could pay Martin’s veterinarian bills, and he gradually ditched the bottle. Though he wouldn’t get sober until after Martin’s death, Healy credits the dog with starting him on the path to sobriety: “I wanted to keep him and I could not have kept him had I continued to drink the way I had.” The author and his elderly mother bonded over Martin. He began attending mass as a result of their more comfortable relationship and, over the years, gained strength from his Catholic faith. (The book takes its title from a Christian psalm.) Healy even embarked on a ten-day silent retreat at a monastery. The silence proved challenging only when he ran across a monk who used to tend bar at one of his hangouts.
Dog-lovers who found Marley & Me too saccharine will welcome this darker-hued appreciation of a canine friend.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-101259-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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