Deborah Thompson - Böcker

What do dogs mean in America? How do Americans make meaning through their dogs? The United States has long expressed its cultural unconscious through canine iconography. Through our dogs, we figure out what we're thinking and who we are, representing by proxy the things that we don't quite want to recognize in ourselves. Often, it's a specific breed or type of dog that serves as an informal cultural mascot, embodying an era's needs, fears, desires, longings, aspirations, repressions, and hopeless contradictions. Combining cultural studies with personal narrative, this book creates a playful, speculative reading of American culture through its canine self-representations. Looking at seven different breeds or types over the last seven decades, readers will go on an intellectual dog walk through some of the mazes of American cultural mythology.

Told from the perspective of a self-identified “crazy dog lady,” these eleven interconnected essays follow one woman’s relations with five different dogs. Together, they travel over terrain spanning her husband’s battle with cancer, his death, her grieving process, and her rejoining the living as her dogs lead her forward from the other end of their leashes. Alongside her personal story, she considers such cultural issues as Americans’ unhealthy relationships with the natural world, ageism across species, poverty and privilege, hoarding, and the meaning of happiness. This is not a sentimental “who-rescued-whom?” book about the healing power of animals. Instead, it explores one representative human’s relationships with dogs, with all their joys but also their frustrations, neuroses, and downright craziness.