"Experience has taught me that christening a dog is by no means the straightforward business you might imagine it to be. Names last a lifetime, and terrible mistakes are made, usually with humorous intentions. I often think with sympathy of two acquaintances of mine, a pug called Gertrude Stein and Fang the Chihuahua. Very droll, no doubt, from the human viewpoint, but a daily embarrassment to the dogs concerned. It is no joke going through life as an object of ridicule. Fingers are pointed, and there is a great deal of vulgar mirth."
From A Dog's Life
By Peter Mayle
Vintage, $11, ISBN 0679762671
Click here for this month's review of Peter Mayle's
A Dog's Life in BookPage.
From The Dark Side of the Game:
From Moving Violations:
From "A Point of View" By Lynn Stegner
"Many players, anxious to the point of distraction in their hostile surroundings, lose themselves in the midday soap operas on television. Along with millions of housewives, these macho, world-class athletes escape their own reality for a few brief minutes in the swirl of an emotional turmoil of a much more innocuous sort. If you are an Atlanta Falcon during training camp and you don't follow The Young and the Restless, you might be left out of the locker room conversation during the afternoon."
The Unauthorized NFL Playbook
By Tim Green
Warner Books, $19.95, ISBN 0446520330
"Neither the heroic foot-borne relief efforts, anticipation of the horrors ahead, nor the brilliance of the scenery around me struck home as the rhythm of the donkey's forelegs beneath my hips. It was walking, that feeling of groping and climbing and floating on stilts that I had not felt for fifteen years. It was a feeling no wheelchair could convey. I had long ago grown to love my own wheels and their special physical grace, and so this clumsy leg walk was not something I missed until the sensation came rushing back through my body from the shoulders of a donkey. Mehmet, a local Kurd and the owner of the donkey, walked ahead holding a harness. I had rented the donkey for the day. I insisted that Mehmet give me a receipt. He was glad to oblige. I submitted it in my expense report to National Public Radio. The first steps I had taken since February 28, 1976, cost thirty American dollars."
War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence
By John Hockenberry
Hyperion, $14.95, ISBN 0786881623
"On any scale and at any distance, maybe especially up close, he was a hero. Truth lies in the details, and from the 'small muscle jobs' (as he referred to them), like baking bread or laying floors or cutting down joe-pye weed or tapping out a travel piece, to the large muscle jobs, like trying to save the West from itself, or writing a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that would embody and enliven western settlement without romance, without the figments of myth, without undue promise, Wally was exactly what he appeared to be, behaved according to what he believed was decent, responsible behavior, and he wrote what his heart knew to be the truth. His life flowed easily into his work, his work was no intruder in his lived life, and between the two he resisted sleights of hand, fabulous optimism, short cuts, language for its own or his own aggrandizement."
in The Geography of Hope: A Tribute to Wallace Stegner
Sierra Club Books, $15, ISBN 0871568837
