Body, Mind & Spirit Books: Life with McDuff by McFadden, Judy: Better World Books
Angelic Encounters in Canine Kind
Author: Judy McFadden
Title: Life with McDuff: Lessons Learned from a Therapy Dog
Publisher: Summit Mountain Publishing
ISBN: 0-982455-40-2
Every person who reads Life with McDuff by Judy McFadden is likely to have an incident to which they relate on a personal level. One of the moments that I most enjoyed was McDuff’s reluctance to get back into the car after a therapy session at Project PRIDE’s Opportunity Village—almost as though he were saying: “This is MY post. You, as an inferior human being, might be inclined to abscond from your post, but I REFUSE!” Another was where McDuff managed to get a severely disabled youngster to smile for the very first time by doing what cats and dogs do best—giving him a thorough licking over, in a way that was “soft, deliberate, focused, and much slower” than usual.
No matter whether you think of yourself as a hardened professional or as a bunny [or dog] hugger, you are likely to revel in Life with McDuff. This tale of redemptive and unconditional love that only a dog can give will most probably have you laughing and crying in turn. Although McFadden claims not to be a writer per se, her story of a therapy dog and its legacy is riveting from start to finish, and is so well written that the author disproves her own statement. And not only do McFadden and her trusty canine companion minister with true compassion to the needs of others, but she has also won an award from the Angel Animal Network for her acknowledgement of the presence of such beings in her life.
Life with McDuff becomes increasingly more focused on McFadden’s altruistic endeavors as one progresses through the book. In the first half, though, she tends to focus more on her own background, during which she is made increasingly aware of the needs of others. It is when she is subjected to an incident of extreme domestic violence that she first experiences the presence of a brilliant white light that she recognizes as her guardian angel, who, she believes, protected her from certain death on that fateful day. But, even before then, McDuff had come into her life—one of the feistiest Scottish terriers that you are ever likely to encounter. He was destined to become her “teacher, companion, and a source of emotional support through the most trying years” of her life.
A delightful and heart-warming book, Life with McDuff is unputdownable and inspirational. Not only does McFadden reveal the ups and downs of life with a therapy dog (the downs largely being due to McDuff’s defiant and determined nature—he was most definitely a dog who did NOT do tricks), but also gives insight into the functioning and importance of Therapy Dogs International and the AKC Canine Good Citizen® programs. This is definitely a book well worth purchasing and recommending to all your friends—it’s an ideal gift for Christmas time, or, in fact, for any time of the year.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Cool collection of anarchic flash fiction from Faulkner award winner
Briefs: Stories for the Palm of the Mind / by John Edgar Wideman. [S.l.]: Lulu, c. 2010.
Fittingly enough, John Edgar Wideman has twice won the Faulkner award for fiction. William Faulkner, you will recall, is famous for, among other noteworthy works, As I Lay Dying, a stream-of-consciousness novel which investigates the psychology of a “subnormal” family. In similar vein, Wideman explores the psyche of the protagonists in his latest collection of what has been described as “hip-hop Zen”. The settings for his stories range from Darfur to Manhattan, and from Pittsburgh to Paris.
The titles of these short stories certainly do not tell “the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”. An innocuous title such as “Manhole” heads up a tale of racism and violence in “the biggest, baddest apple in the world” (a.k.a. New York, natch). Many of his stories contain characters who are physically challenged, such as “Witness”, which is related from the perspective of an onlooker who, though emotionally aware of, and responsive to, what he perceives in his surroundings, is, nevertheless, physically bound to the confines of a wheelchair. Many of his characters are also emotionally constrained in their outlook on the world – each story is the narrator’s own vision of the world around him or her, telling what he or she sees as through the eye of a single-lens camera.
His empathetic (though his protagonist denies, in “Wall” that a writer can have such empathy, but is limited to his own focus on the world) portrayal of such characters reveals that, apart from his political awareness, to which he has given voice in sundry articles on such leading figures as Malcolm X, Wideman is keenly aware of social issues as well. His awareness of the plight and sensitivities of others is, in fact, the mainstay of Briefs: Stories for the Palm of the Mind.
An outstanding characteristic of Wideman’s style is his use of sentence structure, which ranges from his widespread use of enjambment (“Bereaved” consists of a single sentence of ten lines, for example) to short explosive fragments (such as “My, my, Miss May. Oh-blah-dee. Watch out, girl.” in “Party”). The bitter cynicism of “Oh Shit” is counterpoised against the sensitive portrayal of grief in “Witness”: “Art worth a shit these days comes from bums not worth a shit but their shit sells for incredible money and then the shit-faced bums got the nerve to treat everybody like shit.” counterpoised against “Forgive me, Jesus, but look like they grief dancing, like the sidewalk too cold or too hot they had to jump around not to burn up.”
Miniscule as these stories may be, being small enough to hold on “the palm of the mind,” they are yet capable of packing a powerful punch – all the more so for the seething maelstrom of insidious inner-city living that they portray. The voice of the physically challenged rings out from these pages, as does the unconquerable spirit of the socially dispossessed. A collection that will definitely hold more appeal for the open-minded than for the staid and placid reader, Briefs: Stories for the Palm of the Mind holds anarchic potential for those who enjoy slam dunking their fiction. Cool, bro, cool! [Reviewer for BookPleasures.com]
Fittingly enough, John Edgar Wideman has twice won the Faulkner award for fiction. William Faulkner, you will recall, is famous for, among other noteworthy works, As I Lay Dying, a stream-of-consciousness novel which investigates the psychology of a “subnormal” family. In similar vein, Wideman explores the psyche of the protagonists in his latest collection of what has been described as “hip-hop Zen”. The settings for his stories range from Darfur to Manhattan, and from Pittsburgh to Paris.
The titles of these short stories certainly do not tell “the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”. An innocuous title such as “Manhole” heads up a tale of racism and violence in “the biggest, baddest apple in the world” (a.k.a. New York, natch). Many of his stories contain characters who are physically challenged, such as “Witness”, which is related from the perspective of an onlooker who, though emotionally aware of, and responsive to, what he perceives in his surroundings, is, nevertheless, physically bound to the confines of a wheelchair. Many of his characters are also emotionally constrained in their outlook on the world – each story is the narrator’s own vision of the world around him or her, telling what he or she sees as through the eye of a single-lens camera.
His empathetic (though his protagonist denies, in “Wall” that a writer can have such empathy, but is limited to his own focus on the world) portrayal of such characters reveals that, apart from his political awareness, to which he has given voice in sundry articles on such leading figures as Malcolm X, Wideman is keenly aware of social issues as well. His awareness of the plight and sensitivities of others is, in fact, the mainstay of Briefs: Stories for the Palm of the Mind.
An outstanding characteristic of Wideman’s style is his use of sentence structure, which ranges from his widespread use of enjambment (“Bereaved” consists of a single sentence of ten lines, for example) to short explosive fragments (such as “My, my, Miss May. Oh-blah-dee. Watch out, girl.” in “Party”). The bitter cynicism of “Oh Shit” is counterpoised against the sensitive portrayal of grief in “Witness”: “Art worth a shit these days comes from bums not worth a shit but their shit sells for incredible money and then the shit-faced bums got the nerve to treat everybody like shit.” counterpoised against “Forgive me, Jesus, but look like they grief dancing, like the sidewalk too cold or too hot they had to jump around not to burn up.”
Miniscule as these stories may be, being small enough to hold on “the palm of the mind,” they are yet capable of packing a powerful punch – all the more so for the seething maelstrom of insidious inner-city living that they portray. The voice of the physically challenged rings out from these pages, as does the unconquerable spirit of the socially dispossessed. A collection that will definitely hold more appeal for the open-minded than for the staid and placid reader, Briefs: Stories for the Palm of the Mind holds anarchic potential for those who enjoy slam dunking their fiction. Cool, bro, cool! [Reviewer for BookPleasures.com]
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