Katz, Jon. The new work of dogs; tending to life, love, and family

KATZ, Jon. The new work of dogs; tending to life, love, and family. Random House. 237p. bibliog, c2003. 0-375-76055-5. $13.95. SA

In a world where people sometimes have better relationships with their computers than with their families or friends, the dog's role has evolved from "best friend" to surrogate child, focus-for-life, aid for the handicapped, rescuer and therapy assistant. As Jon Katz puts it, "the range of dogs' work today is breathtaking." (p.206) The New Work of Dogs is no dry sociological essay on these roles, but rather a bittersweet look at several individuals whose lives are different because of the dogs they have adopted. Perhaps most memorable are the chapters on the Divorced Dogs Club (a group of five recently divorced women who meet on a regular basis, providing support for each other and receiving added encouragement from their four-legged partners), Donna (who sang regularly to her corgi while she was fighting a losing battle against breast cancer) and Betty Jean, the feisty grandmother whose world revolves around dog rescue: "... rescue was her life, her real work, family and purpose; nothing else came close ... In the same way writers, artists and actors fantasized about giving up their day jobs to pursue their passions, dog rescuers plotted how to do nothing but save dogs. And there were plenty to save." (p.47) Although Katz tries on occasion to be dispassionate and look objectively at our need for companionship and love, he cannot help but get caught up in the stories he hears of love and devotion. "It was a friendship and attachment literally beyond words, often beyond our consciousness." (p.222) Such feelings are understandable. Jon Katz has done a great service in telling these stories of animal-human bonding. Even in his concern for our seeing dogs as "quasi-humans with fur and sharper teeth" he is reminding us of the need for compassion and understanding for both humans and animals. Recommended for all high school, public and academic libraries. Katherine Gillen, Libn., Luke AFB Lib., AZ

Love story?

Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage, by Stephanie Coontz (Viking, 400 pp., $25.95)

THE television spirits of Harriet Nelson and June Cleaver haunt historian Stephanie Coontz. Along with Ozzie and Ricky, Ward, Wally, and the Beaver, these black-and-white specters from the 1950s materialize as whole chapters in her books. Like the 15 angry feminist coauthors of the recent volume Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960, Coontz sees "the 1950s Family" as the lodestone of American social history and the early sitcom housewives as bearers of an awesome, culture-shaping power.

The big news this year is that Coontz has changed her mind about the 1950s family. Her earlier book, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, has been standard reading for a dozen years in college-level history and American studies courses. In it, she vigorously insisted that, "contrary to popular debate, Leave It to Beaver was not a documentary"; rather, the 1950s were "a very deviant decade," and the 1950s family model found in the sitcoms--amiable, pipe-smoking fathers; well-dressed, happy, homemaking mothers; endearing teenagers--was both "a new invention" and "a historical fluke."

In her new book, Marriage, A History, Coontz sharply reverses course. Now, she essentially argues that Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver were in fact documentaries, and of a largely positive nature. Indeed, she says that the 1950s family--instead of being a statistical fluke--should be understood as the product of "a gigantic marital revolution," the "culmination of a new system that had been evolving for more than 150 years." And rather than serve as tragic pawns of a failing patriarchy, Harriet Nelson and June Cleaver now emerge as quasi-revolutionaries, the shapers of history who unconsciously ushered in the new age of liberated love, cohabitation, easy divorce, and same-sex marriage.