Intimate and insightful glimpses into Boylan’s life and the dogs that have helped her learn more about love.
A memoir told through the lens of seven canine companions.
Often, it’s difficult to remember all the details of our lives and the people we once were. “But I remember the dogs,” writes New York Times columnist and LGBTQ activist Boylan, who is on the PEN America board of trustees and serves as the inaugural Anna Quindlen writer in residence at Barnard College. In her latest, the author ties each of the seven chapters to a phase of her life and a dog she has loved. The narrative is somewhat chronological, but the dog stories and timelines also skip around a lot, which occasionally becomes disorienting. As in her previous books, Boylan's wry wit, wicked sense of humor, and unique way of turning phrases shine through, and her candor is powerfully therapeutic. Particularly stunning is the section in which she describes her initial reactions when a close family member also came out as trans. However, this book is not a Boylan primer. Readers who have not encountered She’s Not There (2003), her memoir about her transition from male to female, may long for more detail in this book; the author sometimes skims over major life events she has written about elsewhere. But this is about the dogs, and the canine theme emerged from a Times opinion column, in which she wrote about her dog Indigo, that went viral in 2017. Boylan’s stories about each dog—from Playboy to Sausage to Matt the Mutt to Ranger (whose frequent interactions with porcupines “never ended well”)—range from sidesplitting to downright profound, and the author makes a convincing argument for the inherent need for all creatures to be who they truly are. Though the connections between the dogs and Boylan’s life aren’t always obvious, these tales will entertain, endear, and—fair warning—possibly induce a sudden urge to drive to the local animal shelter.
Intimate and insightful glimpses into Boylan’s life and the dogs that have helped her learn more about love.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26187-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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