Genre: memoir

#BookReview: Pets and the City by Amy Attas

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Pets and the City by Amy AttasPets and the City: True Tales of a Manhattan House Call Veterinarian by Amy Attas
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, audiobook
Genres: animals, memoir, nonfiction
Pages: 320
Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on June 18, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Hilarious, jaw-dropping, and heartfelt stories from New York City’s premier “house-call veterinarian” that take you into the exclusive penthouses and 4-star hotel rooms of the wealthiest New Yorkers and show that, when it comes to their pets, they are just as neurotic as any of us.

When a pet is sick, people—even the rich and famous—are at their most authentic and vulnerable. They could have a Monet on the wall and an Oscar on the shelf, but if their cat gets a cold, all they want to talk about are snotty noses and sneezing fits. That’s when they call premier in-home veterinarian Dr. Amy Attas.

In Pets and the City , Dr. Attas shares all the shocking, heartbreaking, and life-affirming experiences she’s faced throughout her 30-year career—like the time she saw a naked Cher (no, her rash was not the same as her puppy’s); when she met a skilled service dog who, after his exam was finished, left the room and returned with a checkbook in his mouth; and when she saved the life of a retired, agoraphobic Hollywood producer during a monthly treatment for his cat, Amos. In these moments Dr. Attas noticed key insights about animal, and human, nature—like how humans attach to one another through their love of animals, or how animals don’t have pride, ego, or vanity that their humans seem to value so much, sometimes to their detriment.

To Dr. Attas, she doesn’t just heal animals. She witnesses how they and their humans help and heal each other, and how the special bond between pet and owner might actually make us better people.

My Review:

Once upon a time in 1980, there was a book. To be fair, there’s always a book. But the book in this particular case was All My Patients Are Under the Bed by Louis J. Camuti. I still have a copy – even if one or more cats have gnawed on it a bit.

Dr. Camuti, like Dr. Attas, the author of Pets and the City, was a house call veterinarian in Manhattan, in the decades before Dr. Attas finished her training. Dr. Camuti’s practice was just a bit different, however, even for his own time, as he was one of the first vets to specialize in cats.

Dr. Attas, taking up, or finding herself in, her own visiting vet service in Manhattan, takes on all comers, as the stories in her book joyously and sometimes heartbreakingly attest.

To paraphrase the classic Law and Order intro, so apropos because that series is also set in NYC, these are her stories – and the stories of the animals and their people that she has treated along her way.

Reality Rating B: The author does several things in this collection of cat tales and not-necessarily-shaggy dog stories. First she tells her own tale, her origin story, not just how and why she became a vet, but how she fell – or was pushed, she was definitely pushed – into opening her peripatetic Manhattan practice.

Second, she tells oodles of sometimes funny, sometimes sad, occasionally downright heartbreaking stories about the animals – and their people – that she treated along the way. Those stories, even when they absolutely break your heart as they did hers, are THE BEST part of the whole book.

Even if the dogs did outnumber the cats.

Howsomever, as the blurb implies that there will be stories of the rich and famous of Manhattan, the third thing is that there is more than a bit of name-dropping. Unfortunately that part of her story is already starting to seem a bit dated as some of her early famous clients – as ultra-famous as a few of them were back in their day – have since passed away in the decades since Dr. Attas’ career began.

And occasionally the author gets up on her soapbox about animal and/or pet-related causes that are near and dear to her heart. But as this book is squarely aimed at animal lovers of all types and stripes and spots, most readers will empathize with her convictions.

To make a not very long story even shorter, Pets and the City, as much as the title titillates with its resemblance to Sex and the City, isn’t really about the rich and famous, and doesn’t dish dirty secrets on some of the city’s more famous and/or infamous residents. So if that’s what you are here for, this probably isn’t the book for you.

Also if you’re really, really, seriously a cat lover, the dogs are definitely having their day in this book. Personally, I always want more cat stories but the dogs ARE adorable – even when something noxious is gushing out of one of their orifices.

Ultimately, Pets and the City is a collection of (true but the names have been changed to protect the guilty) stories about the pets whose people live and work in Manhattan. No matter how palatial – or how down at heel – the place where their person lives and/or work, it’s the pets and THEIR stories that always takes center stage.

Which is exactly how it should be.

#AudioBookReview: The Most Human by Adam Nimoy

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> B Reviews> book reviews
#AudioBookReview: The Most Human by Adam NimoyThe Most Human: Reconciling with My Father, Leonard Nimoy by Adam Nimoy
Narrator: Adam Nimoy
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon, supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: autobiography, biography, memoir, Star Trek
Pages: 272
Length: 9 hours and 18 minutes
Published by Chicago Review Press on June 4, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Living with Dad was like living with a stranger—as a kid I often had trouble connecting and relating to him. But I was always proud of him.
Even before Star Trek I'd see him popping up in bit roles on some of my favorite TV shows like Get Smart, Sea Hunt, and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. And then one night he brought home Polaroids of himself in makeup and wardrobe for a pilot he was working on. It was December 1964 and nobody had heard of Star Trek. Still, the eight-year-old me had watched enough Outer Limits and My Favorite Martian to understand exactly what I was looking at.
Spock's popularity happened quickly, and soon the fan magazines were writing about dad's personal life, characterizing us as a "close family." But the awkwardness that defined our early relationship blossomed into conflict, sometimes smoldering, sometimes open and intense. There were occasional flashes of warmth between the arguments and hurt feelings—even something akin to love—especially when we were celebrating my father's many successes. The rest of the time, things between us were often strained.
My resentment towards my father kept building through the years. I wasn't blameless, I know that now, but my bitterness blinded me to any thought of my own contribution to the problem.
I wanted things to be different for my children. I wanted to be the father I never had, so I coached Maddy's soccer, drove Jonah to music lessons, helped them with their homework—all the things dads are supposed to do. All the things I wanted to do. So what if my Dad and I had been estranged for years? I was living one day at a time.
And then I got his letter.
That marked a turning point in our lives, a moment that cleared the way for a new relationship between us.

My Review:

It’s an iconic line, isn’t it? “Of all the souls I’ve encountered in my travels, his was the most human.” In my head, I still hear it with all of the Shatnerian pauses, and it still brings a tear to my eye, even though Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan came out more than 40 years ago – and we all know that wasn’t the end for either Spock or the man who made that ‘pointy-eared Vulcan’ a cultural icon.

But Spock was a fictional character, played by a very human man, filled with all of the virtues and flaws that are part and parcel of that human condition. This is a bit of the story of that humanity, as seen through the eyes of someone who was up close and personal with the virtues, and caught – or at least held onto – the brunt of entirely too many of the flaws.

And in this introduction, I’m doing exactly what the author has done – used the memory of his famous father to get at the story of his son. A role reversal of something that Leonard Nimoy once alluded to, that someone – actually someone looking for money in particular – would use his son to get at him.

So this isn’t a Star Trek story. And it explicitly isn’t a biography of Leonard Nimoy. Rather, it tells the story of the family that lived in, as the author referred to it, ‘the house that Star Trek bought’ in LA’s Westwood Village in 1968, how they got there, where they came from, and especially what happened after to the boy pictured on the book’s cover, Leonard Nimoy’s son Adam.

This is Adam’s journey, not Leonard’s. But, as with all families, the lives of the parents – who they were, where they came from, their reactions to the ways that their own parents raised them, and how they internalized that upbringing – reflect on their children, for better and for worse.

This is THAT story.

Reality Rating B: If you come to this book expecting a ‘Making of Star Trek’ story, you’re going to be disappointed. If you’re expecting a ‘warts and all’ biography, you’re not actually going to get that either. Not that both the father and the son didn’t have plenty of those.

This is, admittedly, a story about a man who was a hero and/or a touchstone for more than one generation of fans that shows that he had feet of clay up to the knees – but then so do most humans, which is kind of the point.

Circling back around again – because it is irresistible to talk about the father when this is a book by and about the son – it’s about a dad’s impact, both good and bad, on the life of one man who just so happens to be the son of someone famous.

Once one throws out the preconceived notions about what one expected in this autobiography, it’s something entirely different. At first, I had a bit of a difficult time connecting to the story and the author, but then it started to feel a whole lot more familiar than I expected.

His story resonated with me because our fathers were both products of the same Eastern European, Jewish immigrant, Depression-era generation. Both were workaholics who financially supported their families but weren’t physically around, were often in their own heads when they were, and as a result had strained relationships with their children. Adam Nimoy is my age, so we were viewing the world of the 1970s and 1980s from similar ages and from familiar backgrounds and expectations.

There are times when I wonder if ‘daddy issues’ are what makes the world go around, but I digress, just a bit.

I’m saying that once I found a way into his perspective a little, it made the whole thing work better for me. I listened to the audio, and even his speech cadences felt familiar – not because he sounds like his famous father – he doesn’t – but because those cadences arise from a similar time and place and culture. It was kind of like listening to a cousin.

His story is very much, at points, a walk through dark places, of taking heavy blows from sometimes self-inflicted wounds, and then walking a hard and frequently lonely path through recovery. It becomes a story about what happens after a person stops medicating their emotional pain away and starts feeling their feelings.

Which was something that resonated a hell of a lot more than I expected – as did the parts about how easy it is to hold onto old hurts and older grudges and how difficult it is to let them go.

Rating an autobiography feels different from rating a work of fiction, because even though I’m rating the story as it’s told, that can’t help but feel a bit like rating the life of the person telling it – no matter how much I try not to.  And rating someone else’s life is just wrong. It was what it was and it is what it is and what needs to matter here is how good a job the author AS AN AUTHOR does of telling the story they decided to tell – even though it’s theirs.

Which is where that B rating comes in. It did take me awhile to get into this book, and there were times when it felt like he was kind of whiney in a way that came out in the audio as well. The story is way more about the author’s recovery from addiction than it is about anything else in a way that’s good and important and feels real in its length and its details but also felt a bit long and repetitive as he had to repeat some of the steps – as one so frequently does. It also reads as a kind of ‘slice of life’ story that mostly hits the highlights – and lowlights – but doesn’t dwell on the everyday too much, but a little went a long way when it came to dealing with the family dysfunction – of which there was plenty.

Coming into this expecting one thing and getting another may throw off more than a few readers – although if they stick with it they’ll find a whole lot more than they originally expected. Anyone looking for a story that personalizes the ‘Twelve Steps of Recovery’ will likely find this fascinating, inspiring and helpful as he pulls it down to earth and makes it very real even as he’s invoking a ‘Higher Power’. And in the end, the audio works better than the text because the audio helps to make the story feel authentic. It’s him, and he’s telling his story – warts and all.

Review: Kinauvit?: What’s Your Name? by Norma Dunning

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews> C Reviews
Review: Kinauvit?: What’s Your Name? by Norma DunningKinauvit?: What's Your Name? The Eskimo Disc System and a Daughter's Search for her Grandmother by Norma Dunning
Narrator: Norma Dunning
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Canadian history, history, memoir
Pages: 184
Length: 6 hours and 4 minutes
on August 1, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Better World Books
Goodreads

From the winner of the 2021 Governor General's Award for literature, a revelatory look into an obscured piece of Canadian history: what was then called the Eskimo Identification Tag System
In 2001, Dr. Norma Dunning applied to the Nunavut Beneficiary program, requesting enrolment to legally solidify her existence as an Inuk woman. But in the process, she was faced with a question she could not answer, tied to a colonial institution retired decades ago: "What was your disc number?"
Still haunted by this question years later, Dunning took it upon herself to reach out to Inuit community members who experienced the Eskimo Identification Tag System first-hand, providing vital perspective and nuance to the scant records available on the subject. Written with incisive detail and passion, Dunning provides readers with a comprehensive look into a bureaucracy sustained by the Canadian government for over thirty years, neglected by history books but with lasting echoes revealed in Dunning's intimate interviews with affected community members. Not one government has taken responsibility or apologized for the E-number system to date -- a symbol of the blatant dehumanizing treatment of the smallest Indigenous population in Canada.
A necessary and timely offering, Kinauvit? provides a critical record and response to a significant piece of Canadian history, collecting years of research, interviews and personal stories from an important voice in Canadian literature.

My Review:

The title of this book is a question, because that’s how this author’s journey began. While it begins as a reclamation of identity, what that attempt leads to is a search for it – or at least, and with full irony as becomes apparent during the telling – a search for a very specific piece of government documentation that was intended, not to confirm but rather to deny the lived essence of an identity it was designed to repress if not, outright, erase.

That search for proof of her mother’s, and as a result her own, Inuit heritage led the author, not just to a multi-year search but also to a second act career in academia, exposing the origins and the abuses – whether committed out of governmental malice or idiocy – of a system that may have been claimed to be a system for identifying the Inuit population, but was truly intended to colonize them, divide them, and ultimately erase the beliefs and practices that made them who they were.

So on the one hand, this is a very personal story. The author had learned only in adulthood that she was, herself, Inuit. It’s a truth that her own mother refused to talk about as long as she lived. But when Dunning decided to apply for enrolment in the Nunavut Beneficiary program, she opened up the proverbial can of worms, discovering long-buried secrets that had overshadowed her mother’s life and the lives of all Inuit of her mother’s generation and the one before it. A history that was as poorly documented as her mother’s life and identity.

It’s a journey that began with a hope, middled with a question that turned into an obsession – even after that hope was answered – and led to the author’s search for a history that was long-denied but that needed to be brought into the light.

Reality Rating C: Kinauvit? is a combination of a personal search for identity with the intricacies of searching in records that were an afterthought for the government that recorded them, administered them and was, at least in theory, supposed to serve the people those records concerned but that the government obviously didn’t understand a whit. But the story of that personal search is mixed, but not terribly well blended, with a scholarly paper about the history of the Canadian government’s treatment and suppression of the Inuit peoples over whom the government believed it held sovereignty.

The two narratives, the author’s personal search and the scholarly paper that resulted from it (her Master’s thesis for the University of Alberta) both have important stories to tell, and either had the possibility of carrying this book. The issue is that the two purposes don’t blend together, but rather march along side-by-side uncomfortably and unharmoniously as they are entirely different in structure and tone to the point where they don’t reinforce each other’s message the way that they should – or was mostly likely intended that they should.

This book contains just the kind of hidden history that cries out to be revealed. But this attempt to wrap the personal journey around the academic paper results in a book that doesn’t quite work for either of its prospective audiences.

I listened to Kinauvit? in audio, which generally works well for me for first-person narratives, which this looked like it would be. Also, sometimes an excellent reader can carry a book over any rough patches in its text, especially for a work with a compelling story or an important topic that I have a strong desire to see revealed. Kinauvit? as an audiobook had both of the latter, a search that was compelling, combined with a deep dive into historical archives which is absolutely my jam, resulting in a true story of government neglect and outright stupidity.

But it is very, very rare that authors turn out to be good readers for their work unless they have some kind of performance experience. In all of the audiobooks I have ever listened to over the past three decades, I can only think of one exception to serve as an exception.

In this particular case, the author recites the book as though she was delivering the academic paper that forms the core of the book. But this publication of the work was not intended to BE an academic paper. The audience for this work would be better served with a narrator who is able to ‘voice’ the book, to use a narrative style imbued with the flow and the cadences of a storyteller.

The dry recitation that I listened to blunted the impact of the personal side of the story while the inclusion of the words “Footnote 1”, “Footnote 2”, etc., when one of the many, many footnotes occurred in the text was jarring to the point that it broke this reader out of the book completely. That the footnotes themselves consisted of the simple reference to the place in the source material from which the quote was drawn added nothing to the narrative but made its origin as a scholarly paper all too apparent.

In the end, this book left me torn. I wanted to love it. I was fascinated by its premise, and remain so. It’s important history and not just Canadian history. The truths that the author uncovered deserve a wider audience and more official recognition than has been achieved to date. But this vehicle for telling those truths doesn’t do them justice, even though justice is exactly what is needed.

Review: Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater by Peggy Orenstein

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
Review: Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater by Peggy OrensteinUnraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World's Ugliest Sweater by Peggy Orenstein
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: autobiography, biography, history, memoir, women's history
Pages: 224
Published by Harper on January 24, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In this lively, funny memoir, Peggy Orenstein sets out to make a sweater from scratch--shearing, spinning, dyeing wool--and in the process discovers how we find our deepest selves through craft. Orenstein spins a yarn that will appeal to everyone.
The Covid pandemic propelled many people to change their lives in ways large and small. Some adopted puppies. Others stress-baked. Peggy Orenstein, a lifelong knitter, went just a little further. To keep herself engaged and cope with a series of seismic shifts in family life, she set out to make a garment from the ground up: learning to shear sheep, spin and dye yarn, then knitting herself a sweater.
Orenstein hoped the project would help her process not just wool but her grief over the recent death of her mother and the decline of her dad, the impending departure of her college-bound daughter, and other thorny issues of aging as a woman in a culture that by turns ignores and disdains them. What she didn't expect was a journey into some of the major issues of our time: climate anxiety, racial justice, women's rights, the impact of technology, sustainability, and, ultimately, the meaning of home.
With her wry voice, sharp intelligence, and exuberant honesty, Orenstein shares her year-long journey as daughter, wife, mother, writer, and maker--and teaches us all something about creativity and connection.

My Review:

Looking back – and oh how happy I am to be able to do that – we all unraveled a bit during COVID. At its simplest, Unraveling is one author’s story of how she dealt with that “Great Unraveling” by, well, raveling. Technically by knitting, but if the sheep baas, shear it.

So the framework of Unraveling is centered on what turned out to be the author’s pandemic project. People did all sorts of things to help them through the lockdown, or to provide structure while doing so, or perhaps a bit of both.

The author, who was an author in the Before Times whose in-progress book tour dissolved in the lockdowns, did not adopt a new pet as many people did. Although her project did involve animals – just not in any of the usual ways.

As a lifelong knitter, she decided to go deeper into a hobby she learned from her mother. SLFHM for short, as she learned that many, many fiber artists learned their craft from their mothers.

Orenstein went very deep, even though her shears often didn’t go nearly deep enough. She decided to experience the entire process of knitting from the first stage of the work to its final product by learning how to shear sheep, take the sheared wood through cleaning and carding, spin it into yarn, dye it using natural dyes and last but not least, knitting a sweater from the fruits of her labor. Which was also, naturally (pun intended) a fruit of her labor.

The steps of her project, frustrating, messy, aching and all too often colorful – whether from bruises or yarn going through the color spectrum, form the backbone of the book.

But each step and stumble along that way turned the author’s mind, and followed by the reader’s, down the myriad byways of history, science, sociology, ecology and pretty much anywhere and everywhere else that the human experience takes us.

Spinning thread leads to thoughts about the rise of civilization, the development of language and the independence generated by women’s work along with excoriations about the patriarchy that all too often suppresses it. Dyeing leads to the history of the chemical industry. The handwork – and hard work – of producing one’s own clothing gets into a discussion of the rapaciousness of the clothing industry and its effects on the environment.

One thought leads to another. Inevitably. As humans do.

Mixed in with a fascinating meander through history and sociology are personal elements, as Unraveling is kind of a journal of one woman past midlife dealing with all that life throws at us when we realize that there are more days behind us than in front of us. That our parents are going or gone. That our children – if we have them – are moving out and away. And all of that in the midst of quarantines where the rituals that usually surround those milestones are out of reach, as are the loved ones who are leaving us behind, one way or another.

Reality (and Escape) Rating A-: I’m calling it both, as this is a nonfiction book about the author’s way of escaping from the unstructured, amorphous nature of life under lockdown. Sometimes, finding purpose is the best thing we can do for ourselves as humans, and Unraveling is one person’s story about that journey.

Unraveling turns out to be a thoughtful book combining a lightness of heart with the heaviness of a sweater produced by hands filled with a lot of love and no small measure of grief. The exploration of the process of creating the sweater and all of the sweat equity that went into each step will draw in many readers – particularly those with some interest or experience in any of the fiber arts – whether they were taught by their mothers or not.

The explorations into history, culture and science will remind readers of some of Mary Roach’s work, or even Caitlin Doughty’s work about the death industry (Smoke Gets in Your Eyes), that same idea of using a process to explore a concept and its history in depth. Whether the depth of the research in Unraveling goes as far or as deep is a question that this reader can’t answer, but I found it all utterly fascinating – even though I’m not a knitter.

I suspect there will be some mixed feelings among readers about the more personal issues the author brings to this work, especially her grief over the final loss of her mother and the everyday loss of little pieces of her father as he succumbs to Alzheimer’s. As someone in the same age cohort, her thoughts about her losses resonated with me, as did her considerations – and still considering – the inevitable changes coming to her own life as she and her husband face retirement and what lies beyond. That part of her story may not work for every reader, but it certainly did for this one.