Dog is My Co-Pilot: Great Writers on the World's Oldest Friendship From the Editors of "The Bark"


By Tanya Turgeon

REVIEW by Tanya Turgeon

Three Rivers Press, 2003
288 pages
$14.00

I admit this review was a challenge, as no words I can write will do justice to the words already written by this group of prolific writers that includes Alice Walker, Ann Patchett, and Maxine Kumin.

Even the title, "Dog is my Co-Pilot," is a perfectly worded summation of the role dogs have evolved to play in our lives.  Whether we admit it or not, many of us cannot imagine navigating through life without a four-legged, tail-wagging friend by our side, or on our lap, or in our bed.  Thanks to the editors of the award-winning dog-centric magazine "The Bark," these forty-two amazing writers not only admit it, but describe it with soul-touching clarity.

A perfect example of the eloquent honesty of these stories appears on page 34 during "The New Girl" by Margaret Cho.  "When I saw them both lying in his bed, rolled up into little dog doughnuts, I screamed because they looked so cute.  They woke up and looked at me, annoyed, and went back to sleep with a sigh."  These two sentences are so simple, yet skillfully articulate those deeply personal moments when the beauty of a dog's essence is just unbearable.  And of course such moments are only truly genuine when we acknowledge the humorous irony of the dog's spirit, which often can hardly be bothered with such sentiment.

An array of experiences are covered.  Louise Bernikow takes her rescued Boxer on a book tour.  Jon Katz describes a Welsh Corgi's immeasurable commitment to his dying mistress.  Elena Sigman discovers the joy that is dog through her child's eyes.  Despite the uniqueness of each story it turns out that it doesn't matter whether you're a cartoonist like Lynda Barry, a novelist like Erica Jong, a poet like Mark Doty, or your works have graced the pages of "Esquire" or "The New Yorker."  When the subject matter is dogs, these writers are all on the same page.

As the last word of the last essay sinks in, you will feel as if you have found a long-lost community of like-minded people - dog observing, dog appreciating, dog loving and able to put into words everything you've ever felt about dogs.

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