A serviceable story of inspiration and the love between a boy and his pet.
A boy and his dog, finding new ways to encourage each other past their limitations.
We haven’t quite reached the point where bookstores have their own section for print versions of YouTube videos, but with hours of video being uploaded every second, there’s certainly no shortage of source material. While many videos become popular for esoteric reasons bewildering to anyone over the age of 20, some touch on a desire to see pockets of goodness in a world beset with bad news. One such video, viewed more than 2 million times, reminds us of the power of the connection between pets and people. Owen was an 8-year-old boy with a rare genetic disorder in which muscles are unable to relax after they contract. This can result in near paralysis, with muscles constantly overworked and difficult to control. Haatchi was an Anatolian dog named after a famous Japanese dog that returned to the same train station stop for years after his master had died, waiting for his master to disembark from the train. In January 2012, Haatchi was hit over the head and left to die on a train track; the train took one of his legs and most of his tail, but he managed to survive. His limitations made it difficult for him to interact with other dogs; Owen’s challenges made almost everything difficult for him. Together, they have been able to push past physical limitations to find new strength and satisfaction. Holden (Gifted and Talented, 2012, etc.) does an adequate job fleshing out the details of Owen’s treatments and Haatchi’s gradual ability to trust humans again, but she provides too much detail about the fame that Owen and Haatchi have found—e.g., receiving awards, giving a signature to Queen guitarist Brian May, etc.
A serviceable story of inspiration and the love between a boy and his pet.Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-06318-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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
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