No comments about Dog Talk: Lessons Learned from a Life with Dogs.

1 comments about Friendly Feathers: Life with Pierre, an African Grey Parrot.

1. Written by Pierre's owner Dr. Fran Smith, Friendly Feathers: Life with Pierre, an African Grey Parrot is a charming, true-life softcover picturebook about a family's day-to-day routine with Pierre, a talkative African Grey Parrot. Pierre is a surprisingly intelligent bird who has learned to use many human words and phrases appropriately - from telling the family poodle "How you doing, good girl? SIT!" to commenting "You're right, Pierre. It's raining!" when he sees a downpour to "That's hard work!" when he sees meatball and spaghetti prepared. The only thing Pierre never says is "Good night" when it's time for lights out. The simple color illustrations bring Pierre to life, and the very last page features a photograph of Dr. Smith and Pierre. A joy for young bird lovers to read. (It should be noted that African Grey Parrots require a hefty amount of time and energy to properly care for, live for up to 60 years, and should not be purchased as pets unless the owner is up to the challenge!)

1 comments about Some Angels Have Four Paws: Life Lessons from Our Dogs.

1. This book should come with a little pack of kleenex - it is so touching. I read it in one sitting and cried and laughed and learned! I can't wait for her next book.

1 comments about What Happy Dogs Know.

1. Very, very, cute book. It shows all the wonderful little life lessons dogs can teach us.It makes you reflect on the trivial things we worry about sometimes.

4 comments about If You Tame Me: Understanding Our Connection With Animals (Animals, Culture, and Society).

1. This book was a pleasure to read. It expresses many ideas I've had myself (and that you've probably had, too) but more deeply and eloquently than I would ever have dreamed possible. Irvine ties so many different observations, facts, and feelings into a comprehensive framework that makes perfect sense.
   
   I would caution the prospective buyer that this book would probably be too difficult a read for someone who hasn't received some college-level instruction in the social sciences and the philosophy of science.



2. This book is very thought provoking and efficiently reviews several perspectives regarding the connection between humans and animals. It is very well written and succintly conceptualizes the human-animal bond.



3. Leslie Irvine's voice provides those in animal science, animal welfare and just plan animal lovers with a new insight into the psychological relationship of the human-animal bond. A compelling theoretical read with real-life examples. A must have in any animal welfare/animal social policy or human-animal bond literature.
   Kate Nicoll, MSW Soul Friends, Inc.



4. Sociologist Dr Leslie Irvine's If You Tame Me is a very important and inspiring book. It will be of great interest to all who love animals and are concerned about their welfare. If you sense a kinship with nonhuman animals and the natural world, you will thoroughly enjoy this book. It is very well-written and well researched. It takes many of the assumptions that we commonly make about the animal "other" and skilfully dismantles them to reveal pernicious social constructs that should stimulate us all to be more cognizant of how we treat other species. I couldn't put it down!

No comments about Lions & Tigers & Mares, Oh My!.

5 comments about The Tarantula Whisperer: A Celebrity Vet Shares Her Secrets to Communicating With Animals.

1. There's much to be learned about talking with one's pets from Dr. Pastan in this book. She doesn't, however, explicitly reveal her secret for whispering to tarantulas. I think she probably has really tiny lips.



2. The title was interesting and a grabber as I am working in animal healing/communication and wished to learn more from someone claiming they knew how to do this. I had hoped this book would assist in that process with new information. I was very disappointed as there was only minimal referrals to how to do this--only a few sentences in all. Most of the book focused on many different animals, what their human companions had done or not done and what she did, many times referring to things heard in vet school that most of the lay public would have no knowledge of--perhaps it will educate someone on these aspects, just not on the communication. This did not give a very good model on how to facilitate this process and obtain accurate results. More information really needed to be included for this to be considered a book dealing with animal communication for someone serious about including this skill in working with their animal companions. It has a good title, just no real content on the subject saddly. For the serious student there are many other books that work much better than this one.



3. Intrigued by the title and encouraged by the rave reviews, I was not prepared for my level of disappointment with this book. It struck me that Dr. Pasten was so busy thinking of a rejoinder to everyone that I found it hard to believe she actually listened to what the animals were saying to her. Or perhaps she just related better to animals. I found her sense of humor appallingly offensive for a book of this nature. I kept waiting for her to NOT have a smart comment at the end of each story which I'm sure was meant to be humorous but was often just silly. Please, save your money.



4. it was a really interesting book to read and is a great introduction for anyone interested in alternative animal medicine it had some good general points about communicating with animals and brought up some issues that you would have never thought of.



5. The Tarantula Whisperer brought some tears and plenty of joy and laughter to me. I got the sense that Dr. Pasten is very passionate about her veterinary work and is equally passionate about sharing the special human-animal bond with her audience. Her creative writing geniously intertwines real-life stories about her clients and personal companions and gives simple, yet interesting approaches to making your pets happy...Happiness is what it's all about, isn't it?

   I'm anxiously awaiting her next book!

4 comments about To Absent Friends: A Collection of Stories of the Dogs We Miss.

1. The delivery on this was also wonderful the book is about dogs who we've loved and lost is a wonderful book



2. I have always thought there was a good reason that "dog" is "God" spelled backward.
   This book, and I have read many on the subject of companion loss, truly capturess
   the absolute unconditional love that dogs so willingly bestow on us mere humans. It
   is a tragedy in the worst sense that some of us don't deserve such devotion -
   as in the story of the "Dark-Brown Dog." I would caution readers that this particular
   chapter is exceedingly difficult to to absorb. Most of the stories however are a
   heartfelt tribute to dogs whose love and complete dedication colored the authors landscapes
   in the most meaningful of ways. It is, as is said in the book, a travesty of justice
   that they can't accompany us longer in our journey through life.



3. Yes, it's THAT Jameson Parker, the blond brother from TV's "Simon and Simon" PI show. He left show biz to become a writer, and is apparently doing a darn good job.

   This is a collection of stories, essays, and poems about dealing with the grief of losing a beloved dog. Included are familiar names - like James Herriott, John Updike, and James Thurber - from familiar books, and unfamiliar pieces, originally published in newspapers and foreign books. Parker himself even has a short piece, a very touching one on the pet-owner's most difficult decision: euthanasia.

   Let me warn you, you probably won't be able to read more than one or two of these pieces at a time. I found myself in tears, time after time. But the writing is good, and not all of the stories are complete tearjerkers.




4. Those of us who have ever loved a dog will be deeply moved by this collection of stories. The authors range from dog trainers to owners of a beloved household pet, but each writer captured something of the gift dogs give their human companions. My only complaint with the book was with the occasional typographical errors that the publisher should have caught. The book was most impressive in every other respect. It tugged at my heart strings, and I am sure that other readers will share my feelings.

5 comments about My Fine Feathered Friend.

1. My Fine Feathered Friend
   By William Grimes
   North Point Press 2002
   $15 USA, $24.95 Canada
   85 pages, illustrations
   ISBN: 0-86547-632-2
   
   Reviewed by Karen Davis, PhD, President of United Poultry Concerns
   
   "I looked at the Chicken endlessly, and I wondered. What lay behind the veil of animal secrecy?"
   
   My Fine Feathered Friend is a bittersweet tale that leaves you aching after you put the book away. In part this is because the main character, a large handsome black hen who appears mysteriously one winter day in the writer's yard in Queens, disappears as mysteriously as she arrived. This is a true story. The author, William Grimes, a restaurant critic for The New York Times, is intrigued, fascinated, and finally haunted, by this hen. He perceives her as a kind of Earth Goddess, as solid as a tree trunk, rugged, compact, able and enduring, yet elusive, vulnerable, and, ultimately, as ephemeral as a fairy princess. She vanishes when he comes to love her. He calls the hen, simply and archetypally, the Chicken.
   
   When I first started reading My Feathered Friend, I was put off by the tone. Grimes refers to the hen for a number of pages as "it," while referring to his and his wife's cats as "hes" and "shes." His style is pat with similes and cultivated assurance. I thought, okay, Grimes wants to make sure that no one, including himself, gets emotionally involved with this chicken. He's keeping the lines drawn. But I was wrong. The story reflects his growing tenderness for the Chicken, moving through levity and wonderment to love, sorrow and loss.
   
   The Chicken has an aura of the "familiar" in folklore, an enigmatic being regarded as both a homely acquaintance and a supernatural spirit embodied in an animal that links that animal to a particular person while retaining an inviolable otherness. Grimes's Chicken is like a visitor from another planet (exotic and ineffable) who probably escaped from the local poultry market in Queens (squalid and local). She is a hero and a survivor -- "a brave little refugee"-- who flouts false stereotypes about chickens. "I'd look out back and see a cat chasing the Chicken across the yard," Grimes writes. "Ten minutes later I'd see the Chicken chasing a cat." She is at once endearingly personal and profoundly impersonal. She has her own projects. She is self-possessed. She projects an arch authority, like the author himself. She dominates Grimes's yard, his cats, and his consciousness. She is, he confesses protectively, "a hard read."
   
   The Chicken tracks through the universe by way of a residential patch of earth -- a "pocket paradise" reclaimed from a "wasteland of weeds" in New York City. She captures the eye of a beholder who becomes a Witness driven to Inscribe Her Being. Grimes attempts to fit what he "knows" about chickens (he eats them and makes his living writing about them as food; otherwise he says "the humble chicken was foreign to me") with his deepening perception of, identification with, and ultimate yearning and mourning over this particular hen. She moves him. He is affected by her "air of mystery," her "appetite for play," her "brilliant evasive maneuvers," her "genuine courage," her "character," her "willful high-spirit," her evocation of what the poet William Wordsworth inestimably versed as "something ever more about to be."
   
   Grimes reads up on chickens, passing on to us pieces of information (some accurate, some not) about Gallus domesticus in folklore, history, and poultry manuals, as a backdrop to, an explanation of, the Chicken, a creature so definite, and infinite, so solid and numinous, she eludes classification. He muses:
   
   "Was it pure coincidence that she liked to sneak up on Yowzer, the cat most likely to develop a nervous twitch when caught unawares? Time after time I saw the Chicken trot up delicately when Yowzer had his back turned, squawk a couple of times, and then watch as the cat leaped a couple of vertical feet. The Chicken, after a successful ambush, would run off jauntily, with a cackle that sounded suspiciously like a chuckle."
   
   At other times, "I'd see Bruiser and Crusher snoozing in the basket, Yowzer draped along a nearby wooden bench, and the dark, shapeless form of Midnight filling out the sagging seat of an old sea grass chair we had bought for a couple of dollars at a yard sale. And in the midst of the group, perfectly content, sat the Chicken. It was a heartwarming sight."
   
   One night a police helicopter hovers over the yard, causing the pine tree in which the Chicken is roosting to sway violently under a wind of hurricane force. "Somewhere, deep in the branches," Grimes writes, "the Chicken was holding on for dear life. I couldn't begin to imagine what was going through her tiny mind. By now, I figured, she had either suffered a fatal heart attack or had been dashed to the ground. But no. The next morning, amid wreckage out of Apocalypse Now, the Chicken reappeared, brimful of vim and vigor."
   
   But one spring day, the Chicken is gone. She does not return. Grimes and his wife Nancy look everywhere. They wrack their brains trying to remember if there were any behavioral signs they failed to notice. "The previous afternoon I had watched her resting comfortably in her nest beneath the pine tree," Grimes writes. "I searched for signs of violence but did not find any. The only trace of the Chicken was a single black feather near the back door. The Chicken was definitely, profoundly missing."
   
   It is hard reading the final pages of this book. The depression Grimes describes is not roguish but real, though he tries to make light. "We had grown to love the Chicken," he says. We believe him: so had we. "She really was a big presence in the backyard," Nancy sighs. You go back to the book cover and study the jet black sweet bird face with its rosy comb and pert expression, framed in an oval mirror. If you know chickens, you know the look of that bright round eye, so attentive yet pensive.
   
   My Feathered Friend is like an exquisite blade sliced across your bowels in the midst of a light-hearted romp that won't heal. The book ends with unappeased longing and unsettled questions (unhappy questions on many levels), not "closure," nor should it. Though Grimes says the story is "at an end, at least for us," still, he wonders and hopes, maybe the Chicken will come back. Maybe she's on a journey. He bought things for her. He and Nancy wait for her. They keep a light in the window. Maybe he'll wake up one morning, look out the window, and see "a large feathered form bustling around the patio, scattering cat food and clucking."
   
   But for now, as Alice Walker said about a horse named Blue, in her excruciating essay, "Am I Blue,"* let us not let the animals whom we piercingly perceive become for us merely "images" of what they once so beautifully expressed and are. The Chicken is every chicken. One like no other. Take the next step.
   
   
   *In Living By the Word: Selected Writings 1973-1987. This book of Walker's essays also includes "Why Did the Balinese Chicken Cross the Road?" ("[T]o try to get both of us to the other side.")
   _________________________________________________________________
   Karen Davis, PhD, is the founder and President of United Poultry Concerns, a nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl (www.upc-online.org). She is the author of Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry; A Home for Henny; Instead of Chicken, Instead of Turkey: A Poultryless "Poultry" Potpourri"; More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality (Lantern Books, 2001); and The Holocaust and the Henmaid's Tale: A Case for Comparing Atrocities (Lantern Books, 2005).
   
   
   



2. A poignantly told memoir of a season spent in the company of a somewhat bohemian chicken. I gave a copy of this book to my vet after we tried for several months to save the life of one of my pet chickens. She hadn't much experience with chickens, more so with the fanicier hookbills often found in one's the parlor, so I wanted her to know what it was like to know a chicken on a more personal level. The author accomplishes this very well, sharing valuable chicken lore with his affectionate and often respectful look at the life of a chicken and life from The Chicken's point of view.



3. I ran across this book at the library looking for substantive books on chickens--the cute cover caught my eye. This is a very entertaining and enjoyable read!

   I'd recommend this book as one you'll finish quickly, share with a friend or two, and want to read again yourself one day.




4. This extremely short book really qualifies as more essay than "book," and as much as I enjoyed it, I wondered who would shell out hard-earned cash for its slim contents.

   Then I found myself handing it around to people as I would share a cartoon or funny email. "Zip through it over lunch," I said, "Take it instead of a magazine while you're waiting for your oil change or dentist appointment."

   And so I learned what this book is best for: for a few bucks, you can pass a smile around to your friends. The eye-catching cover is hard for anyone to resist, and the illustrations are great. If you know someone who's been adopted by a stray animal, this is perfect for them. But if not, pass it on anyway. It's a light, funny read that will make anyone smile.

   In Grime's hands this unusual bird manages a truly universal appeal. I loved the pleasure it seemed to take in sneaking up behind a skittish cat and sending the cat vertically airborne with a sudden cackle. Then there's the pet store employee who tries to explain that they don't carry chicken feed, because a chicken is not a "particular animal." Grimes has an eye and ear for gem moments like these.




5. This is an absolutely adorable story about a man who comes to know and love a chicken who suddenly appeared in his backyard. I first read the authors article about the enigmatic and willful chicken in the New York Times and I actually saved that article because I enjoyed it so thoroughly. My Fine Feathered Friend is just as charming as that article was and better since the author is able to elaborate more on the chicken's fantastic personality and the personalities of the numerous cats that interact with the tenacious bird. The author really knows how to describe animals and the cats encounters with the chicken are truly vivid and terribly amusing. You will not forget this chicken. Its personality lingers long after the final page. The book is a joy and I highly recommend it. Thank you, Mr. Grimes, for sharing such a delightful story!

5 comments about Madison Avenue Maxi.

1. Having a dog is no easy task. They require a lot of work and personal interaction -- talking, walking, bathing, grooming, and just plain old loving -- dogs need their people as much as people need their dogs. I always considered myself a cat person. I grew up with Mittens, our family tabby who died at the old age of 12, and since then have adopted several cats that I watched get old and finally leave the mortal coil. When we moved to Turks & Caicos I brought three cats with me from the states.
   
   So when my husband, who moved a few months before me, started talking about this stray potcake who kept following him home smiling all the way, my first response was, "Please just don't feed it!" We had a disastrous dog adoption experience once and I did not want to repeat that ever again. Long story short, suffice it to say that Smiley's picture graces my Blackberry, we keep a supply of treats on the kitchen counter, and I now understand the "dog thing".
   
   Elke & Ben Gazzara happened into their lovely Maxi in a similar way. Elke's daughter adopted a dog and then couldn't keep her. Ben did not want a dog in the house, and as a working actor with much traveling a dog was not convenient. But that little dachsund Maxi wormed her way into their house and then into nearly every high end restaurant, hotel, boutique, party, hospital, and several film sets along the way.
   
   But Madison Avenue Maxi is not only about a dog, but about her people. We see Ben & Elke in good times and bad, going through health crises, career changes, unexpected travel, but always with Maxi by their sides (or under the table in a bag). It is a book that speaks to the common bonds and life experiences of pets and their humans, and while sappy at times appeals to the best in human (and canine) nature, a highly enjoyable read.



2. In Madison Avenue Maxi, the wife of a movie star provides an inherently fascinating and engagingly personal memoir of the life and times of the family dog, a miniature dachshund she and her husband adopted, and offers up whimsical, fun anecdotes on how to dog became a part of their fast-paced, globe-trotting lifestyle. Any general-interest library strong in books about pets and stars will find it a fun leisure choice indeed.



3. This book is a perfect gem! It is a warm, transformative story about how Maxi, a charming dog, captures the hearts and affection of a busy couple.
   
   This beautifully designed book would make a perfect gift for anyone and certainly for animal lovers.
   
   But readers of all kinds will love this book as it is also a fine piece of debut non-fiction writing.



4. For every parent who ends up raising their child's unwanted pet. Enjoy how Maxi the dog, captivates his grandparents and becomes an indispensable part of their home.



5. What a delight! In this already hectic holiday season, Maxi was a breath of fresh air. For all dog lovers and anyone who wants an escape that is both heart-warming and fun.