|
| Dog Days: Dispatches from Bedlam Farm | 
 enlarge | Author: Jon Katz
Publisher: Villard
Category: Book
List Price: $23.95
Buy Used: $5.34
You Save: $18.61 (78%)
New (34) Used (33) Collectible (1) from $5.34
Avg. Customer Rating:  27 reviews
Sales Rank: 18867
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.8
ISBN: 140006404X
Dewey Decimal Number: 636.7
EAN: 9781400064045
ASIN: 140006404X
Publication Date: June 26, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: EX-LIBRARY; used item may have library binding and show stamps, stickers or other marks. Items not meeting quality expectations may be returned for refund. Buy with confidence - your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics!
|
| Customer Reviews:
 What a story, what a reader! January 7, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I would recommend that you listen or read Jon Katz previous story " A Good Dog" first. It will help you the background on the animals he introduces in this book. I listened to the unabridged CD performed by Tom Stechschulte.. Let me tell you, with Jon Katz's storytelling and Tom Stechschultes voice, you will drift into a wonderful and enlightning story.
great for animal lovers January 3, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
If you like James Harriot's books and the TV series "All Creatures Great & Small", you will love Jon Katz's book about life on Bedlam Farm. It chronicles the day-to-day life of his dogs,cat, and livestock and the changes that affect them all. I have also read "A Good Dog" by Katz, an emotionally-wrenching account of his true love for his troubled dog Orson (which was a good book but so hard to read) and I can promise you that this one is much lighter & happier. He even prefaces it by saying "No dogs die in this book" for those that can bear the thoughts of losing a pet. Another animal must be put down because it is sick, and he mentions a farming accident where a neighbor's tractor kills 3 deer, but those are the only cloudy moments in an otherwise sunny book. Katz is a great writer & has a deep love and respect for animals that I admire & share. I highly recommend this book!
I LOVE JON KATZ'S BOOKS. January 1, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I BELIEVE I HAVE READ ALL MR. KATZ'S BOOKS ON DOGS. HE LOVES HIS DOGS LIKE I LOVE MINE. HOPE HE NEVER STOPS WRITING ABOUT HIS FARM AND HIS 'ZOO'. DONKEYS AND COWS,DOGS,ETC.
 Another dog spins through the poster boy's revolving door December 27, 2007
16 out of 27 found this review helpful
There's nothing new in this book, which will delight Katz's admirers and further disgust his detractors. The only slight difference is that Katz formerly tried to portray himself as some sort of dog expert, both on training dogs and on the sociology of dogs and humans. Having been proven particularly clueless on both, he's backed off somewhat on that. His books thus have slightly less grandiose philosophy and more of a personal story air. However there's nothing new in the personal stories either, which makes this reader believe there's either very little reality to these stories, something many have long suspected, or that Katz is particularly stupid.
Change the dog's names and this book is essentially very similar to previous books. In earlier books, Katz dumps his once loved labs for the excitement of trendier and more photogenic border collies. He'd gotten his book out of those "staid" labs and he needed new exciting dogs to write about. Euthanasia count - 2. Then, having discovered the unstaid border collies were too much for him, and having written the requisite books about them, he dumps them to go back to labs - except for BC Rose, whom he needed for herding duties. Euthanasia count - 3, one BC "rehomed. All four dogs of the first few books are now gone, dead or given away. He then gets a book out of his newly acquired lab puppy, and picked up another sedate lab with a tendon injury repaired by her breeder (though one doubts he would ever spend that kind of money on the dog himself, based on his own philosophies on vet care and dogs). But now he realizes he's got nothing new and exciting to write about, other than describing his philosophy on animals and money (don't spend it) and his philosophy about everything else - spend money freely on housekeeping, farm help, and renovations, not to mention buying more land. Odd that he never gives the reader lectures on why it is immoral to restore an antique barn, or spend money on animal communicators, or housekeepers or barn help for what's essentially a play farm, but we are treated to several lectures in this book and others on why it is immoral to spend money on vet care for sick animals that exceed their productive cost. He's a bit schizo on this subject, since his books cater to the soft animal loving heart of potential consumers. Since Katz pretty much has no heart for anything but himself, it's hard for him to dredge up good subject matter. He needs animals to write about and since he can't forge any lasting relationships with them, he's now stuck. So for Dog Days he once again jettisons a now disposable lab for a more exciting BC. This ups the revolving door to Euthanasia count 3, Rehomed 2. In a deja vu moment (or perhaps Katz just reworked old copy, after all it sold before) the new BC "slips its lead" and once again goes running down the road, fodder for cars, shades of Orson, while Katz chases it madly in the car in a Katzenjammer kind of idiotic dash.
At this point, I just can't suspend disbelief that Katz has once again had a dog slip its lead. What kind of lead is he using? Later in the book is another deja vu moment, when he introduces one of his dogs to a rescue dog recuperating in his barn and the dog attacks his own. In another deja vu moment, he rediscovers screaming at the new dog yields poorer results than praise. All of these situations have happened before, and it seems Katz has either learned nothing as a dog handler or he thinks his readers are equally clueless and can't remember he's used all this material before. At this point, a reader just wishes he had forgone buying more land, and actually put up some functional fences to keep his dogs in and taken some training classes to learn the use of a leash. Are we supposed to forget that in a previous book one of the potential reasons for Orson's temperamental decline was that he had an unresolved hit by car injury from his early days in Katz's care? That he grew nervous and edgy from being yelled at? That one reason for Homer's problems was that he was attacked by other dogs in Katz's care? How are we supposed to react to these continuing mistakes and near abuse with new dogs knowing the disastrous results from before? Are we supposed to cheer him getting another potential victim on which to repeat the same dangerous mistakes? Sympathize with him when that dog gets killed, rehomed or put to sleep?
Katz has forgone the lesson, put forth by so many, that getting a dog should be a lifetime relationship for the dog. A good safe relationship. Of course he has good excuses why he needs to get rid of his dogs - he always belabors these as fodder for his books. Both acquiring and disposing of dogs is sellable subject matter. The reasons seldom hold up from book to book, but he trots them out gamely anyway. In "Katz on Dogs", Clem was going to be the shining example for his training methods - and ended up being the dog always left behind, and finally dumped on someone else's kindness when it turned out she just wasn't suitable as a hawker of books or a herder and thus didn't fit anywhere in his life. In "A Dog Year", Homer was the sweet tempered, nearly perfect herder, before being dumped and rehomed so that Katz could "buy up" to a dog with working herding lines. In "Dogs of Bedlam Farm", Orson was rehabilitated, safe with the little kids who came along the fences. But having served his purpose in that book, by the time we got "Orson, A Good Dog", we heard nothing of the formerly lavish praise and only a litany of his faults as if we couldn't refer to or remember the book we'd read before. In "Dog Days", Katz speaks with pride of his newly and lavishly renovated "dog room". Apparently, we're not supposed to remember Orson, vainly trying to defend his home against the workmen coming to renovate that room, pelted with biscuits and shoved aside with tools and workboxes, ignored and forced to ramp up his aggression till he bit someone, while Katz stayed holed in his study, presumably writing either mantas of praise or condemnation about him, depending on the book. The wonder is that Katz seems to have forgotten writing that. Were I Katz, I wouldn't take any pride in the renovation of that room, seeing how it was done over, and funded by, Orson's now dead body. And of course we hear about why Clem, still just a young dog, no longer fits in his life, but the new potentially "lifetime dog" BC does. God help it.
It's all just words, written to serve the book of the moment; another dog served up like dinner and then, like dinner, slaughtered one way or another. And the words are all garbage, too easily seen through by anyone who can remember from one book to the next. To Katz, his dogs are so clearly fungible, taken up, touted and praised, then discarded. So easily is one dog substituted for the other that he tells the same stories about them, over and over. Only the names change. Sadly their fates don't seem to. And perhaps that's why, in Dog Days, he so identifies with working farmers and the casual disposition of livestock, because he treats his dogs the same fungible way. His farm is also a working farm, except it produces books, and when that book is over, and that dog served up, he gets rid of it for the next. That's pretty much the lesson of this book, and the subliminal point of the title. To Katz all days are dog days. Each dog gets his season, his day in the sun, his shining accolade, and then, the season past, the dog gets dumped or killed, his star waning, and room made for the next shining light in the sky. That seems to be the point of Katz's books and his philosophy. In that vein, Katz might be better off numbering his dogs, like his farmer friends do their livestock, rather than naming them. It would be more honest.
Suffice to say, if you have read one Katz book, you've read them all, and none are worth reading.
I want to visit Bedlam Farm November 28, 2007
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I came across this book in our public library. I never heard of Jon Katz or his writings. I am glad that I discovered his books, and his writings on Bedlam Farms reminds me a little of James Harriot. His interactions between the farm animals and dogs are amusing.
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
