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The New Work of Dogs: Tending to Life, Love, and Family
by Jon Katz
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks (2004-06-08)
ISBN: 0375760555
EAN: 9780375760556
Dewy Decimal #: 636.7
Paperback: 272 pages
Release Date: 2004-06-08
SKU: 19742
Condition: Used: Very Good
Comments: Book in very good condition.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
In an increasingly fragmented and disconnected society, dogs are often treated not as pets, but as family members and human surrogates. The New Work of Dogs profiles a dozen such relationships in a New Jersey town, like the story of Harry, a Welsh corgi who provides sustaining emotional strength for a woman battling terminal breast cancer; Cherokee, companion of a man who has few friends and doesn’t know how to talk to his family; the Divorced Dogs Club, whose funny, acerbic, and sometimes angry women turn to their dogs to help them rebuild their lives; and Betty Jean, the frantic founder of a tiny rescue group that has saved five hundred dogs from abuse or abandonment in recent years.
Drawn from hundreds of interviews and conversations with dog lovers and canine professionals, The New Work of Dogs combines compelling personal narratives with a penetrating look at human/animal attachment, and it presents a vivid portrait of a community—and, by extension, an entire nation—that is turning to its pets for emotional support and stability in a changing and uncertain world.
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Customer Reviews
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WARNING!
Rating  (1)
Date: 2008-08-23
What kind of person stands by and watches as another person beats an innocent and helpless dog? Doesn't that make you an accessory to the crime?
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I LOVE DOGS
Rating  (5)
Date: 2007-09-10
1 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
MR. KATZ NOT ONLY UNDERSTANDS DOGS,BUT UNDERSTANDS HOW WE HUMANS FEEL ABOUT OUR PUPS. I TRULY LOVE HIS BOOKS AND HAVE READ ALL OF THEM....
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Lot's of good dog books, but not here
Rating (1)
Date: 2007-02-12
2 out of 5 customers found this reveiw helpful
I've read many, many good dog books. After reading this one I can say without reservation that this is not one of them. It's formula based and predictible and poorly written. Seems like I've seen a lot of this "stuff" before.
If you love good writing and dogs and books about dogs don't crack this book. Don't make me say I told you so. Yuk!
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Great Read!
Rating (5)
Date: 2005-04-27
9 out of 10 customers found this reveiw helpful
I really enjoyed reading this book about the new work of dogs. Jon Katz writes what I always see in the lives of people with dogs, but can't exactly put into words. He does a great job of that by writing about the lives of people with dogs and how their dogs serve them. Yes, there are actual working dogs in the world working on farms and such. But the work he writes about in this book is more emotional, even spiritual. It is about how we see our dogs, what we expect of them, and in turn how we treat them. Some people in the book relied on their dogs for emotional support, companionship, unconditional love. Others only needed them for a season of their lives, then discarded them, or didn't see their dogs as in need just as we are for just being dogs and having human companionship. I see people like this everywhere. Jon Katz does a fantastic job of writing about real-life examples of this new work. Some stories are heartbreaking, while others make you smile. It's a great book.
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what's new about this?
Rating  (2)
Date: 2005-01-09
20 out of 25 customers found this reveiw helpful
Other reviews of this book have done a good job of summarizing its thesis, which is that dogs were "previously" bred for physical labor and are now primarily in the business of serving their owners' emotional needs.
I've really enjoyed some of Katz's previous books. I am not a "dog person," but I have found his analysis of dog/human interactions to be well-documented and surprising. This book, however, was a big disappointment. Katz provides little evidence for his historical generalizations, and, by focusing largely on suburban owners who have unbalanced relationships with their canines, he overstates the significance of the "new work" he identifies for dogs.
Katz focuses almost exclusively on middle-class American dog owners, with little attention to urban dwellers (save one chapter)or rural dog-owners who still use their dogs for farm labor or hunting, not "show" sheepherding. What about dogs in other countries and locales, who still perform work in a variety of contexts? We don't even have to leave the US for examples. How are dogs in Alaska or Wyoming or the Jersey Pine Barrens different from dogs in the smug 'burb of Montclair?
Dogs have labored as part of the family for centuries, and they still do in many parts of the world. But that doesn't mean they also haven't served as loved and loving companions as well. Literature from previous eras is full of examples of how domestic pets have meant more to their humans than just "go get the sheep, Spike." (And not just in children's books; check out poet Christopher Smart's seventeenth-century poem "In Praise of my Cat Geoffrey.") Katz doesn't talk about the history of dog/human relationships in depth; he simply argues by assertion that dogs were "previously" used for physical labor and are are "now" primarily engaged in emotional labor.
I think a wider perspective and a "both/and" focus would be more informative for Katz to pursue. Today, serving humans' emotional needs may be the primary task of suburban dogs - but it's not the ONLY THING. Sometimes humans' relationships with dogs are balanced rather than pathological or subtly abusive (like many of the owners he portrays in his book). Some dogs aren't just "used" by humans, but develop powerful attachments to people - in spite of Katz's assertion, based on advice from a breeder friend, that dogs will forget a vanished human almost immediately.
Finally: when humans observe emotional responses in animals, this doesn't necessarily mean we're anthropomorphizing. Perhaps emotions aren't a uniquely human province. Perhaps humans as a species aren't as exceptional as we like to think we are. Perhaps there is a much wider territory out there than Katz maps here.
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