The Underdogs: Children, Dogs, and the Power of Unconditional Love - Tapa blanda

Acerca del autor

Melissa Fay Greene is the author of Praying for Sheetrock; The Temple Bombing; Last Man Out; There Is No Me Without You: One Woman’s Odyssey to Rescue her Country’s Children; and No Biking in the House Without A Helmet. Her honors include two National Book Award nominations, a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, the ACLU National Civil Liberties Award, the Hadassah Myrtle Wreath Award, the Salon Book Award, Elle Magazine’s Readers’ Prize, the Georgia Author Award, and a Dog Writers of America Award. She is a current Guggenheim Fellow.

De la contraportada

A profound and surprising account of the dogs who rescue children and adults from the trenches of grief, disability, and loneliness

The Underdogs tells the story of Karen Shirk: felled at age twenty-four by a neuromuscular disease, she was rejected by every service dog agency in the country as “too disabled.” Her nurse encouraged her to raise her own service dog, and Ben, a German shepherd, dragged her back into life. “How many people are stranded like I was,” she wondered, “who could lead productive lives with a service dog?”

A thousand dogs later, Karen Shirk’s service dog academy, 4 Paws for Ability, is restoring hurting children and their families to life. The frontiers of the human-dog bond are explored here with insight, compassion, humor, and joy. A cast of remarkable characters—scientists and felons, dog trainers and parents, children with disabilities and the great dogs themselves—together address questions about our attachment to dogs, what constitutes a productive life, and what can be accomplished with unconditional love.