A powerful story of dedicated service to abandoned birds and veterans and how bringing them together helped save them all.
Parrots and military veterans bond and heal each other.
Abused and abandoned parrots are fairly common in the United States. People purchase them for pets without understanding the challenges: They are large, noisy, need plenty of space to fly and forage, want to be with other parrots, and can live more than 50 years. When Lindner fell in love with an abused Moluccan cockatoo she named Sammy, she started on a journey that changed her life. After Sammy, she adopted Mango, another abused cockatoo. At the time, the author was working as a clinical psychologist and also began helping homeless veterans suffering from PTSD. When the veterans were introduced to the parrots and began speaking to them when no one was watching, Lindner had an epiphany. She realized the parrots had fewer emotional problems around the vets, and the men and women with PTSD were much calmer and more capable of handling their stress. So the author decided to start a parrot sanctuary where vets could work with and care for the birds. After much work and many years, Serenity Park was born, built on the grounds of the LA Veterans Administration Healthcare Center. Lindner pleasingly blends the stories of several out-of-luck veterans with those of the abused birds as well as facts and information about the care and maintenance of parrots. She also shares the story of her love for one of the men she helped who has worked with Lindner at Serenity Park for many years. Her story of dedication to the birds she loves and to the men and women she has helped is encouraging and uplifting. Bird lovers, in particular, will enjoy the descriptions of the parrots she saves, each with his or her own unique personality.
A powerful story of dedicated service to abandoned birds and veterans and how bringing them together helped save them all.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-13263-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
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
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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