Being a stay-at-home dad, the father of four children and the primary caregiver for an assortment of pets, including two mini-pigs, may not be everyone's cup of tea, but this intrepid British author lived to tell the tale.
Whyman (Goldstrike, 2010, etc.), whose fiction tends toward dark tales of adventure and mayhem, also writes advice columns for young people. In this humorous chronicle of a year in the life of a London family transplanted to a rural suburb, the author describes his misadventures as a stay-at-home dad responsible for the care of two adolescent daughters, a young son and daughter, a ferocious Canadian sheep dog, assorted chickens, a cat and the two pigs. Adding mini-pigs to the family had seemed to be a fun idea. Whyman explains that reportedly the pigs were highly sociable and were “one of the smartest species on the planet after humans, chimps, and dolphins.” The expectation was that they would be easy house pets, but reality proved otherwise. Although they were smaller than ordinary pigs, they quickly grew too large to keep in the house. Not easily house-trained, the pigs ate the remote controls on the video-game console and raided the kitchen looking for food. Despite protests from his children, Whyman insisted that they be kept outdoors, but containing them created another set of problems as they raided the hen house for eggs, dug up the lawn and broke through fences. According to the author's account, his series of mishaps ended only when he took the advice of a helpful local farmer and accepted that his pets were indeed barnyard animals. They ultimately became less destructive, but they did not evince empathetic or other qualities characteristic of chimps and dolphins. While the author successfully milks his account for laughs, animal lovers may be disappointed.
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-1828-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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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