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Thurber's dogs
A collection of the master's dogs, written and drawn, real and imaginary, living and long ago
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1955
43 people are currently reading
240 people want to read
About the author
James Thurber
357 books608 followersThurber was born in Columbus, Ohio to Charles L. Thurber and Mary Agnes (Mame) Fisher Thurber. Both of his parents greatly influenced his work. His father, a sporadically employed clerk and minor politician who dreamed of being a lawyer or an actor, is said to have been the inspiration for the small, timid protagonist typical of many of his stories. Thurber described his mother as a "born comedienne" and "one of the finest comic talents I think I have ever known." She was a practical joker, on one occasion pretending to be crippled and attending a faith healer revival, only to jump up and proclaim herself healed.
Thurber had two brothers, William and Robert. Once, while playing a game of William Tell, his brother William shot James in the eye with an arrow. Because of the lack of medical technology, Thurber lost his eye. This injury would later cause him to be almost entirely blind. During his childhood he was unable to participate in sports and activities because of his injury, and instead developed a creative imagination, which he shared in his writings.
From 1913 to 1918, Thurber attended The Ohio State University, where he was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity. He never graduated from the University because his poor eyesight prevented him from taking a mandatory ROTC course. In 1995 he was posthumously awarded a degree.
From 1918 to 1920, at the close of World War I, Thurber worked as a code clerk for the Department of State, first in Washington, D.C. and then at the American Embassy in Paris, France. After this Thurber returned to Columbus, where he began his writing career as a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch from 1921 to 1924. During part of this time, he reviewed current books, films, and plays in a weekly column called "Credos and Curios," a title that later would be given to a posthumous collection of his work. Thurber also returned to Paris in this period, where he wrote for the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers.
In 1925, he moved to Greenwich Village in New York City, getting a job as a reporter for the New York Evening Post. He joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1927 as an editor with the help of his friend and fellow New Yorker contributor, E.B. White. His career as a cartoonist began in 1930 when White found some of Thurber's drawings in a trash can and submitted them for publication. Thurber would contribute both his writings and his drawings to The New Yorker until the 1950s.
Thurber was married twice. In 1922, Thurber married Althea Adams. The marriage was troubled and ended in divorce in May 1935. Adams gave Thurber his only child, his daughter Rosemary. Thurber remarried in June, 1935 to Helen Wismer. His second marriage lasted until he died in 1961, at the age of 66, due to complications from pneumonia, which followed upon a stroke suffered at his home. His last words, aside from the repeated word "God," were "God bless... God damn," according to Helen Thurber.
Thurber had two brothers, William and Robert. Once, while playing a game of William Tell, his brother William shot James in the eye with an arrow. Because of the lack of medical technology, Thurber lost his eye. This injury would later cause him to be almost entirely blind. During his childhood he was unable to participate in sports and activities because of his injury, and instead developed a creative imagination, which he shared in his writings.
From 1913 to 1918, Thurber attended The Ohio State University, where he was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity. He never graduated from the University because his poor eyesight prevented him from taking a mandatory ROTC course. In 1995 he was posthumously awarded a degree.
From 1918 to 1920, at the close of World War I, Thurber worked as a code clerk for the Department of State, first in Washington, D.C. and then at the American Embassy in Paris, France. After this Thurber returned to Columbus, where he began his writing career as a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch from 1921 to 1924. During part of this time, he reviewed current books, films, and plays in a weekly column called "Credos and Curios," a title that later would be given to a posthumous collection of his work. Thurber also returned to Paris in this period, where he wrote for the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers.
In 1925, he moved to Greenwich Village in New York City, getting a job as a reporter for the New York Evening Post. He joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1927 as an editor with the help of his friend and fellow New Yorker contributor, E.B. White. His career as a cartoonist began in 1930 when White found some of Thurber's drawings in a trash can and submitted them for publication. Thurber would contribute both his writings and his drawings to The New Yorker until the 1950s.
Thurber was married twice. In 1922, Thurber married Althea Adams. The marriage was troubled and ended in divorce in May 1935. Adams gave Thurber his only child, his daughter Rosemary. Thurber remarried in June, 1935 to Helen Wismer. His second marriage lasted until he died in 1961, at the age of 66, due to complications from pneumonia, which followed upon a stroke suffered at his home. His last words, aside from the repeated word "God," were "God bless... God damn," according to Helen Thurber.
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
April 20, 2022
Number 11 of 13 on my Every Dog Has Its Day personal challenge list, this was a quick read, and I confess to skipping a few of the pieces that did not completely capture my attention. But what I did read, I enjoyed, especially the life stories of two of Thurber's childhood dogs, Rex the bull terrier and Muggs the Airedale.
And of course I liked the cartoons. Thurber's sad looking hound always seems to get into the oddest situations, but he generally comes out of them fine.
I have never read much else by this author, not sure I want to, but for a book to accompany me on a night of going in and out moving the hose around the front yard, this was perfect and lives up to what I suppose could be called its sub-title:
"A collection of the master's dogs, written and drawn, real and imaginary."
And of course I liked the cartoons. Thurber's sad looking hound always seems to get into the oddest situations, but he generally comes out of them fine.
I have never read much else by this author, not sure I want to, but for a book to accompany me on a night of going in and out moving the hose around the front yard, this was perfect and lives up to what I suppose could be called its sub-title:
"A collection of the master's dogs, written and drawn, real and imaginary."
August 11, 2025
If you find stringing as many droll sentences as you can into a paragraph make it funny, then this book is for you. I found the book so uninteresting that I was going to stop somewhere in the middle, but then I saw another review that said the last couple of chapters were worth reading so I kept going. The last several chapters were slightly less droll because he talked more specifically on his poodles and on tracking and Police dogs in a more straightforward way. The stories induced in the book were written between 1926 and 1955.
One sentence to me represented the writing style in the book. “Everybody picked up his phone, or got out his typewriter, or stood up and had his say.“ This was from a story where a sailor trying to get back beck before his leave expired was bumped from a plane by a high priority Bull Mastiff dog on board. I am assuming it is a true story, like his other stories in the book, but rises only to the level of slightly interesting, but more interesting than the fifteen stories that proceeded this one.
As I am oft to do in my reviews, I will include quotes that demonstrate the writing style found in book and are of any interest to me. Be aware that often they are just a portion of the whole paragraph.
Here is a part where that story ‘Blaze in the Sky’ where it heated up:
‘Other newspapers followed the Herald Tribune’, lead, and a nasty rumble arose throughout the land. Many mothers, churchmen, and other right-thinking citizens began to fear that there would be rioting in the streets and that mastiffs and colonels would be strung up on lampposts from Tallahassee to Tacoma and from Dallas to Danbury.’
Here is another part I find interesting in that he writes about dogs and puts simple cartoon like pictures of dogs in his books:
‘I wrote somewhere a long time ago that I am nota “dog-lover,” that to me a dog-lover is a dog in love with another dog, and I went on to say that liking or disliking varied, in my case, with the individual dog as with the individual person. Comparing the two breeds as such takes a critic onto sensitive ground, where the climate 1s changeable and the air is stuffy. A discussion of the relative merits of the ape and the wolf would interest me more than a debate about men and canines. In such a debate the dog could not take part, and when Man began to talk loosely about his Best Friend, or himself, I would reach for my hat and find my way to a neighborhood bar. ‘
Chapter eighteen ‘And so to Medve’ and then the next two chapters ‘Christabel Part 1’ and ‘Christabel Part 2’ where Thurber talks about his poodles is the most personal and interesting stories in the books. (Medve is Hungarian for Bear.) Here is a couple of excerpts from them:
‘The human mother, as I have said before and now say again, devotes her entire life to her young and to her young’s young, a life of continual concern and anguish, full of local and long-distance telephone calls, letters and telegrams, restless nights and worried days, but Medve, like all of her ilk, refused to be bothered after the first few months. She once allowed six of her pups, long past the weaning stage, to take a portable victrola apart, scatter records all over the place, and chew off, with active and eager teeth, one leg of an upright ping-pong table, causing a landslide of paddles and balls, books, ash trays, and magazines.’
‘Like the great Gammeyer of Tarkington’s Gentle Julia, the poodle I knew seemed sometimes about to bridge the mysterious and conceivably narrow gap that separates instinct from reason. She could take part in your gaiety and your sorrow; she trembled to your uncertainties and lifted her head at your assurances. There were times when she seemed to come close to a pitying comprehension of the whole troubled scene and what lies behind it. If poodles, who walk so easily upon their hind legs, ever do learn the little tricks of speech and reason, I should not be surprised if they made a better job of it than Man, who would seem to be surely but not slowly slipping back to all fours.’
‘Now I am a close friend of poodle dogs, having had a lot of them in my time, twenty-five in all, to be exact, I have never known, or even heard of, a bad poodle, Theirs is the most charming of species, including the human, and they happily lack Man’s aggression, irritability, quick temper, and wild aim. They have courage, too, and they fight well and fairly when they have to fight. The poodle, moving into battle, lowers its head, attacks swiftly, and finishes the business without idle rhetoric or false innuendo. One spring my French poodle, who was nine years old at the time, killed three red squirrels in ten seconds, thus saving the lives of hundreds of songbirds, the natural prey of the red marauders. She has never attacked a gray squirrel or a friendly dog, and while she has admittedly engaged in a cold war with cats since 1942, she is too gentle, and too smart, to try to take one apart to find out what makes it purr.’
‘Legend has it that a hunting poodle would swim around all night in a lake hunting for a lost duck, which brings us to an ingenious explanation of the so-called Continental trim of the poodle, familiar to everybody and ridiculous to many. It seems that the back part of the poodle’s body was clipped to give it greater agility and speed in the water, that the “bracelets” on the front legs and the pompons or epaulettes near the hip bones were left there to prevent joints from becoming stiff after a long cold patrol of the fowling waters. The tale also tells (most recently in T. H. Tracy’s The Book of the Poodle) that the pompon on the end of the stubby tail was put there to serve as a kind of periscope by which the hunter could follow the movements of his dog in the water! The exclamation point is mine, because it is surely the front part of the swimming dog that can be most easily detected, and I am certain that before long somebody will put forward the theory that the red ribbon found in the head hair of some poodles was originally tied there to help the duck hunter locate his circling dog.’
‘Very few persons have successfully transcribed the comic talents of a poodle into prose, whether typed or conversational. Something vital and essential dies in the telling of a poodle story. It is like a dim recording of a bad W. C. Fields imitator. My poodle, I am glad to say, does not meet a gentleman caller at the door and take his hat and gloves, or play the piano for guests, or move chessmen about upon a board, or wear glasses and smoke a pipe, or lift the receiver off the phone, or spell out your name in alphabet blocks, or sing “Madelon,” or say “Franchot Tone,” of give guests their after-dinner coffee cups. She is as smart as any of her breed; indeed she has taken on a special wisdom in what some would estimate to be her seventy-fifth, others her one-hundred-and-fifth year, as human lives are measured, but she has never been trained to do card tricks, or go into dinner on a gentleman’s arm, or to say ‘‘Beowulf," or even "Ralph."’
The last two chapters are on Bloodhounds and Police dogs respectively. In them he retells stories of exploits for those dogs. They are interesting enough to be worth reading as he doesn’t try to apply too much awkward humor into them.
‘The English bloodhound has never been one of the most popular housedogs in the world, but this is not owing solely to the dark slander that has blackened his reputation. He is a large, enormously evident creature, likely to make a housewife fear for her antiques and draperies, and he is not given to frolic and parlor games. He is used to the outdoors. If you want a dog to chase a stick or a ball, or jump through a hoop, don’t look at him. “Bloodhounds ain’t any good unless you're lost,” one little boy told me scornfully. It must be admitted that the cumbersome, jowly tracer of lost persons is somewhat blobbered and slubby (you have to make up words for unique creatures like the bloodhound and the bandersnatch). ‘
‘Their leashes were fastened to their harness and the command “Find them!” wag given at 9:45 on the night of October 22, 322 hours after the family was thought to have left their car, The dogs “cast” in wide circles, trying to pick up the trail, until three o’clock the next morning, and resumed the search shortly after six o’clock. There had been rains on the night of October 1o and later, and the underbrush and ferns were wet. Fifteen hours after they had taken up the search, or 337 hours after the supposed entrance of the family into the woods, one of the hounds led its trailer to the body of the youngster. The parents were subsequently found, also dead. Mr. Wilson and the sheriff and other officials later submitted the story of the remarkable search, in affidavit form, to the Bloodhound Club, and it seems likely that the amazing new record will be officially accepted.’
In summary, I overall wouldn’t recommend taking the time to read the book, but if you do want to read it, I would suggest start at chapter eighteen ‘And So to Medve.’
One sentence to me represented the writing style in the book. “Everybody picked up his phone, or got out his typewriter, or stood up and had his say.“ This was from a story where a sailor trying to get back beck before his leave expired was bumped from a plane by a high priority Bull Mastiff dog on board. I am assuming it is a true story, like his other stories in the book, but rises only to the level of slightly interesting, but more interesting than the fifteen stories that proceeded this one.
As I am oft to do in my reviews, I will include quotes that demonstrate the writing style found in book and are of any interest to me. Be aware that often they are just a portion of the whole paragraph.
Here is a part where that story ‘Blaze in the Sky’ where it heated up:
‘Other newspapers followed the Herald Tribune’, lead, and a nasty rumble arose throughout the land. Many mothers, churchmen, and other right-thinking citizens began to fear that there would be rioting in the streets and that mastiffs and colonels would be strung up on lampposts from Tallahassee to Tacoma and from Dallas to Danbury.’
Here is another part I find interesting in that he writes about dogs and puts simple cartoon like pictures of dogs in his books:
‘I wrote somewhere a long time ago that I am nota “dog-lover,” that to me a dog-lover is a dog in love with another dog, and I went on to say that liking or disliking varied, in my case, with the individual dog as with the individual person. Comparing the two breeds as such takes a critic onto sensitive ground, where the climate 1s changeable and the air is stuffy. A discussion of the relative merits of the ape and the wolf would interest me more than a debate about men and canines. In such a debate the dog could not take part, and when Man began to talk loosely about his Best Friend, or himself, I would reach for my hat and find my way to a neighborhood bar. ‘
Chapter eighteen ‘And so to Medve’ and then the next two chapters ‘Christabel Part 1’ and ‘Christabel Part 2’ where Thurber talks about his poodles is the most personal and interesting stories in the books. (Medve is Hungarian for Bear.) Here is a couple of excerpts from them:
‘The human mother, as I have said before and now say again, devotes her entire life to her young and to her young’s young, a life of continual concern and anguish, full of local and long-distance telephone calls, letters and telegrams, restless nights and worried days, but Medve, like all of her ilk, refused to be bothered after the first few months. She once allowed six of her pups, long past the weaning stage, to take a portable victrola apart, scatter records all over the place, and chew off, with active and eager teeth, one leg of an upright ping-pong table, causing a landslide of paddles and balls, books, ash trays, and magazines.’
‘Like the great Gammeyer of Tarkington’s Gentle Julia, the poodle I knew seemed sometimes about to bridge the mysterious and conceivably narrow gap that separates instinct from reason. She could take part in your gaiety and your sorrow; she trembled to your uncertainties and lifted her head at your assurances. There were times when she seemed to come close to a pitying comprehension of the whole troubled scene and what lies behind it. If poodles, who walk so easily upon their hind legs, ever do learn the little tricks of speech and reason, I should not be surprised if they made a better job of it than Man, who would seem to be surely but not slowly slipping back to all fours.’
‘Now I am a close friend of poodle dogs, having had a lot of them in my time, twenty-five in all, to be exact, I have never known, or even heard of, a bad poodle, Theirs is the most charming of species, including the human, and they happily lack Man’s aggression, irritability, quick temper, and wild aim. They have courage, too, and they fight well and fairly when they have to fight. The poodle, moving into battle, lowers its head, attacks swiftly, and finishes the business without idle rhetoric or false innuendo. One spring my French poodle, who was nine years old at the time, killed three red squirrels in ten seconds, thus saving the lives of hundreds of songbirds, the natural prey of the red marauders. She has never attacked a gray squirrel or a friendly dog, and while she has admittedly engaged in a cold war with cats since 1942, she is too gentle, and too smart, to try to take one apart to find out what makes it purr.’
‘Legend has it that a hunting poodle would swim around all night in a lake hunting for a lost duck, which brings us to an ingenious explanation of the so-called Continental trim of the poodle, familiar to everybody and ridiculous to many. It seems that the back part of the poodle’s body was clipped to give it greater agility and speed in the water, that the “bracelets” on the front legs and the pompons or epaulettes near the hip bones were left there to prevent joints from becoming stiff after a long cold patrol of the fowling waters. The tale also tells (most recently in T. H. Tracy’s The Book of the Poodle) that the pompon on the end of the stubby tail was put there to serve as a kind of periscope by which the hunter could follow the movements of his dog in the water! The exclamation point is mine, because it is surely the front part of the swimming dog that can be most easily detected, and I am certain that before long somebody will put forward the theory that the red ribbon found in the head hair of some poodles was originally tied there to help the duck hunter locate his circling dog.’
‘Very few persons have successfully transcribed the comic talents of a poodle into prose, whether typed or conversational. Something vital and essential dies in the telling of a poodle story. It is like a dim recording of a bad W. C. Fields imitator. My poodle, I am glad to say, does not meet a gentleman caller at the door and take his hat and gloves, or play the piano for guests, or move chessmen about upon a board, or wear glasses and smoke a pipe, or lift the receiver off the phone, or spell out your name in alphabet blocks, or sing “Madelon,” or say “Franchot Tone,” of give guests their after-dinner coffee cups. She is as smart as any of her breed; indeed she has taken on a special wisdom in what some would estimate to be her seventy-fifth, others her one-hundred-and-fifth year, as human lives are measured, but she has never been trained to do card tricks, or go into dinner on a gentleman’s arm, or to say ‘‘Beowulf," or even "Ralph."’
The last two chapters are on Bloodhounds and Police dogs respectively. In them he retells stories of exploits for those dogs. They are interesting enough to be worth reading as he doesn’t try to apply too much awkward humor into them.
‘The English bloodhound has never been one of the most popular housedogs in the world, but this is not owing solely to the dark slander that has blackened his reputation. He is a large, enormously evident creature, likely to make a housewife fear for her antiques and draperies, and he is not given to frolic and parlor games. He is used to the outdoors. If you want a dog to chase a stick or a ball, or jump through a hoop, don’t look at him. “Bloodhounds ain’t any good unless you're lost,” one little boy told me scornfully. It must be admitted that the cumbersome, jowly tracer of lost persons is somewhat blobbered and slubby (you have to make up words for unique creatures like the bloodhound and the bandersnatch). ‘
‘Their leashes were fastened to their harness and the command “Find them!” wag given at 9:45 on the night of October 22, 322 hours after the family was thought to have left their car, The dogs “cast” in wide circles, trying to pick up the trail, until three o’clock the next morning, and resumed the search shortly after six o’clock. There had been rains on the night of October 1o and later, and the underbrush and ferns were wet. Fifteen hours after they had taken up the search, or 337 hours after the supposed entrance of the family into the woods, one of the hounds led its trailer to the body of the youngster. The parents were subsequently found, also dead. Mr. Wilson and the sheriff and other officials later submitted the story of the remarkable search, in affidavit form, to the Bloodhound Club, and it seems likely that the amazing new record will be officially accepted.’
In summary, I overall wouldn’t recommend taking the time to read the book, but if you do want to read it, I would suggest start at chapter eighteen ‘And So to Medve.’
December 14, 2013
Thurber's Dogs is an enjoyable collection of stories, essays and cartoons that made me smile and laugh out loud and occasionally get a bit emotional, too! I have a big brute of a dog that doesn't always behave the way he should and can be chased off by our cats even though he has about 100 pounds on them and so the less than perfect dogs in this collection brought me a lot of joy. I was also interested in the ending essay about the bloodhound breed and how dogs working with the police force operated in history both before and after get away cars were available. My overall favorite, though, was the inclusion of many of Thurber's cartoons. I'm really glad I chose this one from the past Reading with Style group reads!
May 18, 2024
I guess this is a collection of his previously published columns or articles. It was 1955. Many of the stories are from much earlier. Attitudes change over the years. Dogs that died were mentioned rather cavalierly. I think the best chapters were the last 3, about poodles, bloodhounds, & police dogs. Hard to believe that when this came out, the German Shepherd dogs who’d been given to the Brooklyn (NY) police by private donors, had retired or died out & not been replaced. Makes me wonder when police in NYC & the rest of the US started using police dogs. His memorial chapter about his poodle, Christobel, was touching. And why does he keep mentioning giving dogs chocolate??!!
January 31, 2015
I love so much about Thurber: his writing, his illustrations, his humor, but most of all, I might love that he loved dogs.
These stories took place in another time -- early to mid-20th century -- so some of the stories are cringeworthy to our 'enlightened' era.
These stories took place in another time -- early to mid-20th century -- so some of the stories are cringeworthy to our 'enlightened' era.
August 10, 2010
All I can say is that this was a huge disappointment. I love Thurber's cartoons, but his stories and novels just do not do much for me. This one in particular......
April 20, 2021
For its time it was great, but there are things in society which have moved on and made some of this unpalatable. Mostly great, though.
May 17, 2023
A delightful book. I had trouble putting this book down
August 27, 2018
Surprisingly brilliant
August 5, 2018
Never earth-shattering, but often cute. The book drags when Thurber gets too serious. My favorite essay is “The Thin Red Leash”, about walking a small dog in a neighborhood full of tough guys. Other gems include “The Dog that Bit People” (and the woman who justified it), and “Look Homeward, Jeannie”, in which he questions the assumption that a dog doesn’t come home because it’s lost: “If this reasoning were applied to the thousands of men who disappear from their homes every year, it would exonerate them of every flaw except disorientation “. Unfortunately it ends with two long and dreary essays on police dogs: first the bloodhound, and then the German Shepherd. I far preferred his portraits of the flawed dogs he has loved.
September 7, 2021
This collection of stories previously printed in various magazines all have something to do with dogs. Some are fiction. Many are about the author's many dogs.
There are the dog drawings throughout the book. Thurber drew strips and single looks at an imaginary bloodhound. These are droll and enjoyable to contemplate.
The stories are easy to wander through. They are mostly relaxing. Most have some humor spicing them.
There are the dog drawings throughout the book. Thurber drew strips and single looks at an imaginary bloodhound. These are droll and enjoyable to contemplate.
The stories are easy to wander through. They are mostly relaxing. Most have some humor spicing them.
January 22, 2019
I had to keep in mind when this was written because in this day and age dogs that get into fights and/or bite people would be put down and the owners who do not keep them under control or confined to a yard and let them wonder at will, would be sued.
Yes there are some humorous moments and interesting stories of some rather remarkable dogs.
Yes there are some humorous moments and interesting stories of some rather remarkable dogs.
August 3, 2019
As far as Thurber goes, one of his works that has aged fairly decently (I.e. nothing too offensive in it.) cute dog pictures, cute stories, worth picking up if you’re a fan of Thurber’s style but trying to avoid his more...misogynistic and dated humor that appears in other books and cartoons.
August 31, 2019
It seems readers either "get" Thurber or they don't. Understanding the time and context in which he wrote helps a lot; I've always been interested in this chapter of American writing and literature, so I get it. And I love dogs, as he did. So, yeah, five stars.
February 28, 2018
Nice, light read from a master of comedic essays and drawings from the first half of the 20th century. Especially good if you like dogs.
Read
February 13, 2022Another book about dogs written by a white dude from another era.
February 16, 2024
This man conveys the meaning of dogness on paper like no one else can. Outstanding work!
July 24, 2022
Read as much of this as I intend to.
Very much a book written in 1955, with the things you'd not be surprised to find in such a book. Amusing dog observations, but tiresome.
Very much a book written in 1955, with the things you'd not be surprised to find in such a book. Amusing dog observations, but tiresome.
January 1, 2010
Thurber is a dog lover who wrote during the early - middle part of the 20th century. Although he is a humorous writer, knowing what I know today about responsible dog ownership, I was horrified through much of this book. Horrified by pet dogs allowed to run wild, breed indiscriminately, and fight without intervention. Many of the stories recount events that were completely avoidable, if only pet ownership had been viewed then with more responsibility.
April 20, 2018
I've been a fan of Mr. Thurber's since I was a kid but rereading the stories in this book was a little disturbing because the difference between what we now know about dogs, dog training, having dogs in our families and the evolution of dogs has, thankfully, come a long, long way since these stories were written.
I still love Mr. Thurber's wit and skill as writer and will continue to reread his books for the rest of my life.
I still love Mr. Thurber's wit and skill as writer and will continue to reread his books for the rest of my life.
February 19, 2018
Thurber's dogsRead
March 5, 2008This is a great funny read to revisit over and over. I think these are collections of his Talk of the Town and other essays in the NYer over the years. Mostly about dogs and human nature.
If you don't know his humor, its very Midwest and slightly absurd in a 1950s sort of way.
If you don't know his humor, its very Midwest and slightly absurd in a 1950s sort of way.
August 20, 2007
Sweet humor. A nice pick-me-up for short subway rides.
February 21, 2016
Very Funny
January 20, 2008
Some of the best dogs.
August 22, 2011
Read this with my family and loved it! He is truly a wordsmith :)
December 6, 2013
Great book. The illustrations were the best.
February 5, 2016
A little dated, but Thurber's dry wit, incredible vocabulary, and adorable dog drawings make this book worth dusting off for any dog lover.
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews