2 comments about Cocker Spaniel.

1. then this is THE one to buy! It has EVERYTHING you will ever need or want to know about the English Cocker. It is out of print and hard to come by, but be patient and search for it-- it's worth every penny!



2. If you haven't seen the book, it is LOADED with beautiful color pictures, and well worth the money. There is some very useful advice on everything from grooming to breeding.

3 comments about Happy Dog, How Busy People Care for Their Dogs: A Stress-Free Guide for All Dog Owners.

1. This book was not all that helpful to me. I needed some ideas to balance my busy life/job with my new dog. It is a nice looking book with some cute dog pictures. It provides some basic information for how to care for a dog, not really geared towards busy people.



2. This book was a dissapointment. If you have never owned a dog, it might be ok. I was expecting a little more on training. There wasn't even a section that really went into any detail on housetraining.



3. I bought this book right before I started a full time job. It provided useful advice on how to care for my dog and still have a life of my own. I loved this book!

2 comments about Wagering to Win: Best Bets for Fun at the Track.

1. A bad day at the track is missing Wagering to Win:Best Bets for Fun at the Track. There has been times when a Senior Moment is the frontrunner and the best book for determining the selection of wager and required amount is tough to compute. For a newcomer or a seasoned veteran of the horses this book allows a fast determination of the action necessary for success.
   
   To be able to determine the selected cost, writing it on a slip, the mutuel machine concuring with your wager waiting for the announcer to say "and they are off" will make you day.
   
   Buy the book....your horses or greyhounds will be more enjoyable.



2. This is THE best guide that I have ever come across in regards to wagering on horses and greyhounds. It is a must have book for any novice gambler, explaining every type of wager, defining track terms, and providing a guide of tracks of North America.

   While the book is a must have for beginners, even most veteran gamblers would find this book quite beneficial. Mr. Andersen begins his book with the most basic of wagering information and progresses into more exotic wagers which would provide much needeed insight to all but the most seasoned gamblers.

   There is an entire section devoted to wagering tables. I have found this to be quite indispensible while at the track trying to calculate how much a particular exotic bet will cost. I never go out to the track without this "tool".

   The only complaint that I had with this book initially, was that I thought it was a greyhound handicapping book. It covers horses as well as greyhounds and definately is NOT a handicapping book. With that stated, I was very pleasantly surprised at all the wonderful information contained in this book and am happy to have made this particular "mistake". I would definately recommend this book to wagerers at any level.

1 comments about New York Dogs.

1. This is another boonie dog book review by Wolfie and Kansas. When we heard the title of Andrea Mohin's book of photographs, "New York Dogs", we thought it was more than a little oxymoronic. After all, how could dogs adapt to New York City? Imagine spending most of your life stuck in a small apartment, never being able to run free in the jungle chasing wild chickens, having humans follow you with a pooper scooper whenever you go for a stroll. When our noncanine animal companions of primate derivation first adopted Wolfie, they lived in an apartment complex in semi-urbanized Tamuning. Wolfie promptly ate the blinds, dug up flowers, barked at caniphobic neighbors, made messes in the neighbors' parking stalls, and forced our humans to spend their life savings to buy a house with a large yard bordering the boonies in Toto.

   We were surprised to find that most of the dogs pictured in Ms. Mohin's book appear happy and healthy in their urban environment. Ms. Mohin's introductory essay also makes New York City seem reasonably hospitable for dogs. After seeing "New York Dogs", we've decided that maybe the Big Apple is not such a bad place after all: all those cars to chase; all those dumpsters and garbage cans to raid; and all those dogs in Ms. Mohin's pictures whom we'd like to meet. We still would not want to live in New York, but this book has convinced us that it might not be a bad place to visit (if we could get around the stupid quarantine laws.

No comments about Designer Dogs.

5 comments about Driving by Moonlight: A Journey Through Love, War, and Infertility.

1. The first time I read something written by Kristin was in the Washington Post Sunday Magazine almost a year ago. I was drawn in by the subject matter and stayed because I really liked how and what she wrote. Since then I've become a huge fan, even going so far as to send my father-in-law to one of her readings for an autographed copy of this book.

   I knew a bit about Kristen's personal history from her article in the Washington Post Sunday Magazine about her chaplain husband (available on her website at www.kristinhenderson.com) and this book tells us even more.

   I loved this book! Kristin takes (what I think are) enormous risks - opening up and telling the world about her relationships with her family, her struggles with infertility, Rosie and the Vette.

   Do yourself a favor and get then read this book! And get a copy for someone you love.




2. I sat down and read this book cover to cover. Though I have not had to go through a battle with infertility, this book was deeply meaningful to me. So many questions that I deal with daily as a wife, mother, and human being. Where does God fit into my life? What is this uncontrolable urge to have (or not to have!) children? Did I want them for the right reasons--and now that I have them, do I really want them? How does it make sense on a cosmic level for someone who wants a child more than anything and cannot have one while there are so many people who frankly should not have them have kids with ease? I really appreciated the author's honesty---she said so many things that few people would have the guts too, especially about marriage. Very thought provoking, comforting and unsettling at the same time. Well worth a read for anyone!



3. After September 11, 2001, Kristin Henderson's husband, a Lutheran minister and Marine chaplain, shipped out to Afghanistan. And Kristin, a pacifist Quaker, climbed into her Corvette with her German shepherd and embarked on a 10,000-mile journey through a country that seemed forever changed. This memoir details that cross-country journey; more importantly, it explores the author's simultaneous journey of self-discovery.

   Henderson deftly weaves together the strands of her road trip with those of her internal one. As she drives the highways and backroads of America and Canada, she sees signs everywhere of people's grief, shock, and anger over the terrorist attacks, and she reflects on her Quaker beliefs, questioning whether those beliefs can be reconciled with her thirst for vengeance. As she fears for her husband's safety and breathlessly awaits his too-infrequent e-mails, she recalls the strain placed on her marriage by the conflicts between her own religious questing and his rock-solid faith.

   Most memorably, she traces the couple's years-long struggle with infertility and the painful, heart-wrenching process of trying to get pregnant.

   This is Henderson's first published book, but you'd never know it from the eloquence of her writing and the complexity of emotion it conveys. She's often hilariously funny -- as when she compares religions to cars; or when she describes the renovation of her Washington, D.C., rowhouse's only bathroom; or when she tells of the eccentric characters encountered at a mountaintop lodge in Montana. But she can also bring a reader to tears with her discussion of a foreign-born teen who is assaulted for looking different; and, of course, her descriptions of infertility treatments and the psychological trauma that accompanies them.

   The author envies her dog Rosie's ability to live in the moment and accept whatever turns up next along the road. As a reader, I found myself envying Rosie as well, but for a different reason: I wished I could have been along on that journey, with so likeable and interesting a tour guide as Henderson at the wheel. Reading her book is the next best thing.




4. I live three miles from the Pentagon, less than an hour's walk on a sunny fall afternoon. Sixties liberal that I am though, I saw it only as a destination for peace marches. But when I woke up the morning of Sept. 12, 2001, with smoke still seeping through my open windows from the terrorist attack the day before, my perceptions had undergone a sea change. "The military is there to protect us," it dawned on me, "and someone's just blown a hole in that protection."

   With my former convictions in disarray, it's no wonder I was drawn to this memoir in which the author suffered a similar shock to her pacifist beliefs. "Does being a pacifist mean...it's wrong even to defend yourself?" she asks. "On TV, I saw that huge plane magically pushing its way into and through a New York skyscraper, metamorphosing along the way into a blooming poppy of fire. I watched tiny, fragile human figures standing at those broken windows a hundred floors up, someone's daughter, someone's son, all peering down and hoping against hope, not knowing there was no hope. Every time I see them, recall them, I want to seize something, anything, on the other side of the world and smash the hell out of it. I know I won't be satisfied until I see whole towns on the other side of the world destroyed. I horrify myself. I want to run away from myself."

   Henderson does "run away." Once she has hugged her Marine chaplain husband goodby, as he ships out for Afghanistan days after September 11, she sets off to drive across the country in a '78 Corvette with only her German shepherd to keep her company. But though she leaves the scenes of carnage behind, she can't escape from her churning emotions, her fear for her husband, or the contradictions that beset her mind. The conflict between her normal pacifism and her instinctual desire for vengeance is not the only discord in Henderson's life: She's a Quaker pacifist married to a Lutheran pastor and Marine chaplain. She parts ways with her husband as well on the subject of religious beliefs -- her growing rejection of the belief that Jesus was God incarnate. Most poignantly, her desire to have a baby increases with every tick of her biological clock, while her husband -- afraid he would follow in his father's footsteps and be an inadequate parent -- doesn't want children at all.

   While Driving by Moonlight is a "road" book, it is much more than that. The story of Henderson's trip is vivid, funny and at times harrowing (as she nearly becomes trapped in a sudden blizzard). The family, friends and strangers she encounters along her way are memorable characters, well portrayed in her hands. But her story is not just that of her journey from one coast to another, but of her journey through life. Fortunately for the reader, the author not only weaves her trip and her life complications together adroitly, but she seems utterly lacking in pretensions and leavens her serious themes with delicious humor. I couldn't stop laughing when she told how she and her dubious husband decided to renovate their only bathroom -- without the help of a plumber. (A perfect start to Sunday during the time the bathroom was ripped out was to pick up the paper from the doorstep, drive to the nearest museum and settle down in the still empty rest room.) Though I read mostly fiction, I found this memoir as engrossing as any novel.

   While I originally picked up the book because the author mirrored the reactions I'd had after September 11, I found myself becoming more engrossed in Henderson's life, in particular her struggle (sadly unsuccessful) to become pregnant, which meant fighting to convince her reluctant husband to agree to each round of infertility treatment, and finally to in vitro fertilization, or as Henderson describes it, "a final Hail Mary roll of the dice."

   Henderson ends with as many contradictions as she started. Planning the trip "gave me the illusion that I controlled my life," she writes, an illusion of which she was quickly disabused as weather closes the road in front of her. But the act of driving itself, immersed in the white noise of the Corvette's engine has become a form of "centering prayer" and she is learning to live -- as all of us must -- with uncertainty. Meanwhile she drives on. Darkness falls and her headlights show nothing but the side of the road. But tomorrow, "the moon will slowly begin opening like an eye, widening to reflect the Light and illuminate the darkness before slowly closing again. Way opens, way closes, and then way opens again, circling around and around as I drive on, the moon and the starry patchwork of constellations all turning and tinkling in the solar wind."

   I felt enlightened and enriched for having read this beautifully written and honest account of another woman's struggle to come to terms with the contradictions in her life.




5. This beautifully written, funny, wrenching and ultimately heartening memoir of a road trip in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 is a rare find. Author Kristin Henderson certainly succeeds in bringing back that time of fear and confusion but what got me was her exploration of connections between the human urges to war and procreation. At the time her husband shipped out to Afghanistan, Henderson was struggling to come to terms with infertility--losing her dream of being a mother and the physical presence of her husband at the same time. Her road trip allowed her the time and solitude to sort through the pain and emotional confusion of all this while, as she says, giving her the illusion of forward motion. We are the lucky beneficiaries of this 'escape plan' as Henderson alternates her experiences on the road--often hooty, always interesting--with recollections of divisions in her self and her marriage over religion, and of the medical and emotional trials of fertility treatment. Reading this wonderful book, I sensed that Henderson, with her trusty dog Rosie at her side, would find the peace she was looking for and I was happy to be along for the vicarious ride.

5 comments about Dear Kilroy: A Dog to Guide Us (Capital Ideas).

1. What a wonderful story about our best friends. It brought back fond memories and tears of our first Golden Retriever, Riley. He was adopted but developed a severe medical problem. Riley poured out his heart with love. I would recommend this book to anyone who owns a dog, owned a dog, wants to own a dog, or is wondering what it would be like to own a dog. You will fall in love with Kilroy and his friend Riley. It is a touching story of friendship and bonding and the service Guide Dogs provide to those in need. Definitely Five Stars!



2. For those of us who have a compassion for animals and the people who need them, "Dear Kilroy" is a must have book. Through pictures, stories and letters, the author gives us a glimpse into the hearts of both people and animals and reminds us just how much we really need one another. If you're an animal lover, rescuer, trainer or if you just enjoy a book which is inspiring, you will love this book. "Dear Kilroy" is the number one gift for all my animal-loving friends this Christmas.



3. I have just finished reading Dear Kilroy. From the first few words, I knew that I didn't want this book to end. I was totally immersed in every page. Harrison's ability to put emotions into such descriptive language left me yearning to cuddle my own dogs. It's beautifully written with equally expressive photos. I can't remember a book that has touched my heart in such a meaningful way as Dear Kilroy.



4. I am a teacher. "Dear Kilroy" is a terrific book for the classroom. Through the stories and photos about dogs, the author shares meaningful lessons about human relations and living more fully. Students can relate to the stories--they "get" it. The story "Riley's Eye" is particularly good when discussing tolerance and acceptance of others. This book is also an excellent example of evocative storytelling; the writing is descriptive yet tight. Every word counts. "Dear Kilroy" is not a children's book, but it is appropriate for all ages. Highly recommended.



5. Nora Vitz Harrison's collection of inspirational stories, photographs and imaginary correspondence captures the magic of the human-canine bond. The common characters among the stories tie the book together so one story flows to the next. I sat down to read the introduction and discovered several hours later that I had read the entire book in one sitting -- it's that compelling. As I read, I came to care for each of the characters, both human and canine. I yearned for a happy ending for all of them. But Harrison's very personal book is true to life; not every story has a happy ending. While DEAR KILROY elicited tears, it also made me laugh out loud many times. It may be about dogs -- guide dogs, animal-shelter dogs and pet dogs -- but DEAR KILROY is more than a "dog" book. It is a book about life, love and becoming better humans. As I read the last page, I felt uplifted, and I was reminded of the very important lessons our animal friends can teach us if we would just pay attention. DEAR KILROY has become my gift of choice to all my animal-loving friends. A beautiful book.

No comments about Poodle (Breeders' Best).

No comments about Neurologic examination of the dog,: With clinicopathologic observations.

No comments about The Dog Who Rescues Cats.