Dog Love

Roving from real life to "dogs' lives" (canine biography and autobiography), kennel clubs to leash laws, "puppy love" to dogs as emblems of mourning and loss, Dog Love unleashes a fresh perspective on a favorite topic. What do the stories of such "celebrity hounds" as Lassie and Millie Bush have to say about the demands we place on their human counterparts in political life and popular culture? In an age when information abounds but comprehension seems to be breaking down, how do fantasies about canine communication express our longing to be understood? Why are we able to accept in our pets the very mix of emotional constancy and sexual inconstancy that dogs our human partnerships? How does our preoccupation with canine pedigree reflect social snobbery, nationalism, and other forms of cultural anxiety? What does the growing body of dog law have to say about our desires to regulate human behavior? Why is it that, from Argus onward, the dog has embodied our most elegiac feelings? In exploring these and other questions, Dog Love shows how, in a society that is less and less "humane," it is with the dog that we permit ourselves to experience and express our deepest sorrows and joys. As this profound and profoundly delightful book makes plain, it is the dog who makes us human.

Publishers Weekly

Wise and witty, Garber (Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life), trains her formidable interpretative gifts on a vastly popular subject: dogs. Unlike such dog litterateurs as Elizabeth Marshall Thomas or Vicki Hearne, however, she observes not dogs themselves but their prominence in American culture. Examining everything from portrayals of dogs in books and films to people who report having had sex with dogs, she posits that our society relies on dogs to bring out its humanity. The argument is not especially original, but no matter: she unfolds it with such agility and imagination as to compel attention. Whether she is discussing the barking dog at the O.J. Simpson trial or offering a Lacanian analysis of Virginia Woolf's book Flush (described as "a tongue-in-jowl reimagining of the life of Elizabeth Barret Browning's beloved spaniel"), she demonstrates a keen and playful ear. There is an occasional odor of the graduate seminar ("Is caninophilia an erotics of dominance?"), but on the whole the prose is frisky and Garber's earnestness doesn't stand in the way of a light tone. Casual readers will also be encouraged by the book's organization into chapters built of brief, discrete segments ideal for browsing. Of recent dog books, this is easily the pick of the litter. Photos not seen by PW. BOMC, QPB, Good Cook and Country Home & Garden alternates. (Oct.)