Greatest Hits: A Dog’s Life: the Autobiography of a Stray by Ann M. Martin

This week we’re featuring some of our “greatest hits” – the most popular Book-a-Day blog posts since we started this almost three years ago. Today’s is A Dog’s Life: the Autobiography of a Stray by Ann M. Martin, reviewed by Bob M.

Every now and then I like to take a break from “serious” reading and check out a Juvenile fiction book. I especially enjoy listening to Juvenile Audio books. One that I listened to recently and enjoyed very much was A Dogs Life: the Autobiography of a Stray by Ann M. Martin, who is best known for the Babysitters Club books. I’m a huge dog lover and had to check with a Youth Librarian (Thanks Kathleen!) to make sure the dog did not die in the end, because Marley & Me just about did me in.

A Dog’s Life is about Squirrel who was born a stray along with her brother Bone in a shed by their mother, Stream at a family’s summer house. As Squirrel gets older she befriends the residents in the shed, a cat named Yellow Man as well as all the mice living in the barn. Mother teaches her puppies everything they need to know to survive and instills in them to be leery of humans. But one morning after mother vanishes Bone and Squirrel decide to leave. The shed was the only place Squirrel ever knew, but she would leave if Bone left, he was her brother and was now in charge.

Bone and Squirrel face many challenges on their new adventure, learning about the world very quickly and are soon found on the side of a highway where a couple stop and  take them home. They don’t live there very long. After one bad night, with garbage ransacking, barking and going to the bathroom in the house, the husband takes the two puppies to a parking lot and throws them out. Two women come along and take Bone, and now Squirrel is on her own.

Alone Squirrel faces new challenges, the cold of winter, starving dogs that will kill to eat, roads, and of course humans. One night Squirrel finds a dog, who she says resembles Bone. Her name is Moon. Squirrel is happy to have a companion. They live together for some time, until a speeding car takes Moons life. Squirrel gets a home but only for the summer, her owners adopt a “summer” dog every year but quickly tire of it, forgetting to feed or walk her. So Squirrel heads out on her own again. Squirrel lives on through the cold winters and hot summers, being careful to stay away from humans, till she is an old dog. An old dog with black fur beginning to turn white, a filmy eye, bad hearing in one ear, and very achy bones in the shoulder and leg that were broken when she was young.

Squirrel finally finds a home with an old woman who names her Addie. Together they form a relationship, each needing the other and Squirrel finally finds contentment with a human.

Prepare to shed some tears as you listen to Squirrel’s story. This heart-touching tale really brings to light the serious problem of homeless animals. By giving listeners a firsthand look through a stray’s eyes and heart, A Dog’s Life will inspire all of us to work together to eliminate this desperately tragic way of life that so many animals suffer. Ann M. Martin herself volunteers for an animal rescue, and she has successfully brought her true-life observations onto the pages of this amazing book. A must-read or listen for everyone.

For information about adopting a local stray check out these websites:

Wake County Animal Shelter

S.P.C.A of Wake County

Find and reserve this book in our catalog.

Travels with Charley; in Search of America by John Steinbeck

This week we’re featuring some of our favorite Audio Books, just in time for planning your summer road trips. You can also click the Audio Books tag at the bottom of this post or at the top of the tag cloud on the right hand side of our blog’s home page for more great audio book suggestions!

What better book to consider taking on a road trip than this one? (Okay, besides  Kerouac’s On the Road.) I’ve enjoyed Steinbeck’s writing ever since I read Of Mice and Men back in High School. Last year, the classics book club that I was in read what many consider to be his greatest work, The Grapes of Wrath. A nonfiction book club at another library had read Travels with Charley and almost everyone — including two friends — loved it, so I knew I’d have to read it. Not long ago I was able to listen to Ron McLarty’s wonderful narration of Steinbeck’s journey. I hadn’t heard McLarty before, but to me, his voice seemed to truly capture John Steinbeck.

Steinbeck and his French poodle, Charley, pack up a camper on the back of a truck and leave Steinbeck’s New York home just after Labor Day to head out to re-discover our country. His goals are to travel incognito, to only use his first name whenever possible, and to stick to the smaller roads and avoid the major highways as much as possible. He starts out heading East through New England and up into Maine before heading West across the Northern part of the country. He eventually makes a loop around the country, including the West coast and the deep South before venturing back up to his home in New York several months later. The National Steinbeck Center in his hometown of Salinas, California has a large map of his travels on display.

There has been a bit of controversy in recent years since people have discovered that Steinbeck did not write a completely accurate diary of his travels. He fudged the timeline about when he was in each location and how long  the various parts of the trip took. He mentions his wife meeting him in a hotel at a couple points along the journey, when she was with him much more of the trip than he indicated. Some of the people he meets (waitresses, policemen, mechanics) are composites of people he met and his own imagination.  But, in recent years we have also heard of many other somewhat fictionalized memoirs, see: James Frey, Augusten Burroughs, and  David Sedaris.

Personally, it doesn’t bother me that a great American novelist like John Steinbeck probably fictionalized large parts of his travel memoir about America. He’s a story teller, and he’s telling us a fantastic story of a man and his dog meeting the everyday people throughout our country at a time in our history which is both nostalgic and embarrassing to look back upon.

One of my favorite parts of the book is when the author laments the disappearance of the city or town in favor of sprawl, as well as the homogenization of the country. Imagine how much more sprawl has occurred and how much more homogenous America is now, fifty years later.

Find and reserve this book in our catalog.

A Dog’s Life: the Autobiography of a Stray by Ann M. Martin

Every now and then I like to take a break from “serious” reading and check out a Juvenile fiction book. I especially enjoy listening to Juvenile Audio books. One that I listened to recently and enjoyed very much was A Dogs Life: the autobiography of a stray by Ann M. Martin, who is best known for the Babysitters Club books. I’m a huge dog lover and had to check with a Youth Librarian (Thanks Kathleen!)to make sure the dog did not die in the end, Marley & Me just about did me in.

A Dog’s Life is about Squirrel who was born a stray along with her brother Bone in a shed by their mother, Stream at a family’s summer house. As Squirrel gets older she befriends the residents in the shed, a cat named Yellow Man as well as all the mice living in the barn. Mother teaches her puppies everything they need to know to survive and instills in them to be leery of humans. But one morning after mother vanishes Bone and Squirrel decide to leave. The shed was the only place Squirrel ever knew, but she would leave if Bone left, he was her brother and was now in charge.

Bone and Squirrel face many challenges on their new adventure, learning about the world very quickly and are soon found on the side of a highway where a couple stop and  take them home. They don’t live there very long. After one bad night, with garbage ransacking, barking and going to the bathroom in the house, the husband takes the two puppies to a parking lot and throws them out. Two women come along and take Bone, and now Squirrel is on her own.

Alone Squirrel faces new challenges, the cold of winter, starving dogs that will kill to eat, roads, and of course humans. One night Squirrel finds a dog, who she says resembles Bone. Her name is Moon. Squirrel is happy to have a companion. They live together for some time, until a speeding car takes Moons life. Squirrel gets a home but only for the summer, her owners adopt a “summer” dog every year but quickly tire of it, forgetting to feed or walk her. So Squirrel heads out on her own again. Squirrel lives on through the cold winters and hot summers, being careful to stay away from humans, till she is an old dog. An old dog with black fur beginning to turn white, a filmy eye, bad hearing in one ear, and very achy bones in the shoulder and leg that were broken when she was young.

Squirrel finally finds a home with an old woman who names her Addie. Together they form a relationship, each needing the other and Squirrel finally finds contentment with a human.

Prepare to shed some tears as you listen to Squirrel’s story. This heart-touching tale really brings to light the serious problem of homeless animals. By giving listeners a firsthand look through a stray’s eyes and heart, A Dog’s Life will inspire all of us to work together to eliminate this desperately tragic way of life that so many animals suffer. Ann M. Martin herself volunteers for an animal rescue, and she has successfully brought her true-life observations onto the pages of this amazing book. A must-read or listen for everyone.

For information about adopting a local stray check out these websites:

Wake County Animal Shelter

S.P.C.A of Wake County

Find and reserve A Dog’s Life in our catalog

Dog Man: An Uncommon Life On a Faraway Mountain by Martha Sherrill

There’s a quirky animal book for everyone.  For a long time I didn’t think that was true. I usually can’t stand them. I found the author of Marley and Me to be smug and irritating. Dewey was just too twee. I’m not a Sneaky Pie Brown fan, and I grew out of Watership Down long ago. Disagree all you like, but, to me, those books are just so overrated. I admit I’m still partial to the works of Farley Mowatt like Never Cry Wolf and The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be (not owned by Wake County), but for the most part I’ll pass on the latest pet elegy making the rounds or your favorite anthropomorphosized animal epic.  I like Jane Goodall, I suppose, but I suspect she doesn’t quite deserve the near religious aura of enlightenment which is sometimes ascribed to her. Flame me. It’s your right. But, understand, I love animals. Real ones, that is. I have three dogs and two cats, and I would have more but my wife made me get rid of the little Spitz puppy that was tearing up the house.  I’ve always been ready to like animal books, but it took a long time to find one that I enjoyed.

Martha Sherrill’s Dog Man turned out to be the one. It’s only as sentimental as it should be and also possesses the virtue of brevity. It’s not long, yet it does justice to its subject. Morie Sawaitashi is a dog nut who, perhaps single-handedly, rescued the Akita breed when it was reduced to a population of just 16 during World War II. He’s not necessarily a hero since he sometimes seems more concerned about the dogs than his own family. It’s funny really. While Japan was undergoing privation and borderline starvation, Morie kept his dogs secretly on his property in the remote mountains and sneaked outside to feed them the choicest food from his larder while he rationed out poorer food for himself and his family.  He thought all this went on beneath his family’s notice, but they all say they knew and resented it. Although he remains happily married many years later, his wife and children haven’t quite forgiven him, but they accept him for the eccentric he is.

Morie’s way of life living in communion with nature is as much a focus of the book as the many Akitas he remembers as though they were his children. He’s depicted as a stubborn holdover from an earlier time. Contemporary culture may never produce something like him again, but it is somehow gratifying to know he continues to live his life with his dogs on a distant Japanese mountain.

Dog Man: An Uncommon Life On a Distant Mountain