Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Readalikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Mar 2007, 224 pages
Paperback:
Apr 2008, 256 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
When Mark Doty decides to adopt a dog as a companion for his dying partner, he brings home Beau, a golden retriever. A moving and intimate memoir interwoven with profound reflections on our feelings for animals and the lessons they teach us about life, love, and loss.
Why do dogs speak so profoundly to our inner lives? When Mark Doty decides to adopt a dog as a companion for his dying partner, he finds himself bringing home Beau, a large golden retriever, malnourished and in need of loving care. Beau joins Arden, the black retriever, to complete their family. As Beau bounds back into life, the two dogs become Mark Doty's intimate companions, his solace, and eventually the very life force that keeps him from abandoning all hope during the darkest days. Their tenacity, loyalty, and love inspire him when all else fails.
Dog Years is a remarkable work: a moving and intimate memoir interwoven with profound reflections on our feelings for animals and the lessons they teach us about life, love, and loss. Mark Doty writes about the heart-wrenching vulnerability of dogs, the positive energy and joy they bring, and the gift they bear us of unconditional love. A book unlike any other, Mark Doty's surprising meditation is radiantly unsentimental yet profoundly affecting. Beautifully written, Dog Years is a classic in the making.
Chapter One
No dog has ever said a word, but that doesn't mean they live outside the world of speech. They listen acutely. They wait to hear a term—biscuit, walk—and an inflection they know. What a stream of incomprehensible signs passes over them as they wait, patiently, for one of a few familiar words! Because they do not speak, except in the most limited fashion, we are always trying to figure them out. The expression is telling: to "figure out" is to make figures of speech, to invent metaphors to help us understand the world. To choose to live with a dog is to agree to participate in a long process of interpretation—a mutual agreement, though the human being holds most of the cards.
What the interpreter must do is tell stories—sometimes to the dog in question. Who hasn't heard a dog walker chattering away to her pet, as if she were serving as a kind of linguistic mirror: "You are scared of that police horse," "Lola loves that ball!" Some people speak...
Doty's earnest sincerity and relentless probing at his subject matter will not be to everyone's taste.
Inevitably compared to Marley & Me, Dog Years has more in common with The Year of Magical Thinking. Doty offers more than just a simple celebration of the relationship between a man and his dogs, or even between man and dog, delving into the universal themes of life and death, grief and happiness. His style is more philosophical than it is sentimental, merging memoir, poetry and prose into his eulogy for his two dogs.
(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Full Review
(396 words).
Mark Doty's seven books of
poetry and three books of
nonfiction prose have been
honored with distinctions
including the National Book
Critics Circle Award, the
PEN/Martha Albrand Award, the
Los Angeles Times Book Prize
and, in the United Kingdom, the
T. S. Eliot Prize.
He has
received fellowships from the
Guggenheim Foundation, the
National Endowment for the Arts,
the Ingram Merrill Foundation,
and the Dorothy and Lewis B.
Cullman Center for Scholars and
Writers at the New York Public
...
If you liked Dog Years, try these:
by Helen Macdonald
Published 2016
Read ReviewsWinner of the 2015 BookBrowse Nonfiction Award
Obsession, madness, memory, myth, and history combine to achieve a distinctive blend of nature writing and memoir from an outstanding literary innovator.
by Susan Wilson
Published 2015
Read ReviewsThree broken souls, and one dog: Pax. All three of them need healing. All three of them are lost. And in Susan Wilson's A Man of His Own, Pax, with his unconditional love and unwavering loyalty, may be the only one who can guide them home.
The Tea Planter's Wife
by Dinah Jefferies
An utterly engrossing, compulsive page-turner set in 1920s Ceylon.
Darling Days
by iO Tillett Wright
A devastatingly powerful memoir of one young woman's extraordinary coming of age.
Raw, emotionally intelligent and unflinchingly honest--a triumph.
About the book
Blood at the Root
"A gripping, timely, and important examination of American racism."
- PW Starred Review
Visitors can view some of BookBrowse for free. Full access is for members only.
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends books that we believe to be best in class. Books that will whisk you to faraway places and times, that will expand your mind and challenge you -- the kinds of books you just can't wait to tell your friends about.
Subscribe to receive some of our best reviews, "beyond the book" articles, book club info & giveaways by email.
