A Good Dog: The Story of Orson, Who Changed My Life - Hardcover

Katz, Jon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 140006189X ISBN 13: 9781400061891

Publisher: Villard Books, 2006

Synopsis

“People who love dogs often talk about a ‘lifetime’ dog. I’d heard the phrase a dozen times before I came to recognize its significance. Lifetime dogs are dogs we love in especially powerful, sometimes inexplicable ways.”–Jon Katz

In this gripping and deeply touching book, bestselling author Jon Katz tells the story of his lifetime dog, Orson: a beautiful border collie–intense, smart, crazy, and unforgettable.

From the moment Katz and Orson meet, when the dog springs from his traveling crate at Newark airport and panics the baggage claim area, their relationship is deep, stormy, and loving. At two years old, Katz’s new companion is a great herder of school buses, a scholar of refrigerators, but a dud at herding sheep. Everything Katz attempts– obedience training, herding instruction, a new name, acupuncture, herb and alternative therapies–helps a little but not enough, and not for long. “Like all border collies and many dogs,” Katz writes, “he needed work. I didn’t realize for some time I was the work Orson would find.”
While Katz is trying to help his dog, Orson is helping him, shepherding him toward a new life on a two-hundred-year-old hillside farm in upstate New York. There, aided by good neighbors and a tolerant wife, hip-deep in sheep, chickens, donkeys, and more dogs, the man and his canine companion explore meadows, woods, and even stars, wade through snow, bask by a roaring wood stove, and struggle to keep faith with each other. There, with deep love, each embraces his unfolding destiny.

A Good Dog is a book to savor. Just as Orson was the author’s lifetime dog, his story is a lifetime treasure–poignant, timeless, and powerful.

About this title

Review:

"Jon Katz understands dogs as few others do, intuitively and unburdened by sentimentality. His keen insights cut to the heart of the human-pet relationship - its immense joys and painful sorrows. With wisdom and grace, he unlocks the canine soul and the complicated wonders that lie within and offers powerful inights to anyone who has ever struggled with, and loved, a troubled animal" (John Grogan, author of MARLEY AND ME)

"Like John Grogan's Marley and Me, A Good Dog shows how the intersection of canine and human can bsometimes result in profound love - as well as profound frustration ... A heartbreaking love story" (USA Today)

"We should all have such a companion" (Washington Globe)

"[A] loving tribute to that once-in-a-lifetime dog" (Library Journal)

Book Description:

A heartbreaking tribute to a difficult dog, by the Sunday Times bestselling author of A Dog Year and A Home for Rose

About this edition

• Publisher: Villard Books
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 140006189X
• ISBN 13: 9781400061891
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224