Milk Teeth: A Memoir of a Woman and Her Dog |  | Author: Robbie Pfeufer Kahn
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 1628740
Media: Paperback
Pages: 352
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.8 x 6.9 x 0.9
ISBN: 0813543711
Dewey Decimal Number: 301.092
EAN: 9780813543710
ASIN: 0813543711
Publication Date: December 30, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Dogs are the most popular pet in the United States and a beloved family member to many. As with a human baby, a puppy's innocent wild behavior can provoke unkind treatment. The source of this unfortunate but common reaction often lies in the past the family history of the caretaker.
Written as a year-long journal, Milk Teeth chronicles sociologist Robbie Pfeufer Kahn s struggle to achieve a loving relationship with her black Labrador puppy, Laska. Mirthful, mischievous, intelligent, and strong-willed, Laska challenges her owner s attempts at leadership and affection. The puppy refuses pats, jumps up, and mouths with needle-sharp teeth. To her dismay, Kahn reacts with fear and anger, sometimes treating Laska roughly. Strangely, these encounters produce flashbacks from Kahn's diminished childhood and with the help of dog trainers, psychotherapy, and literature and theory from a variety of disciplines light the way toward understanding her responses to the puppy. In time, Laska's sharp white teeth no longer serve as a metaphor for her character and she matures into a spirited, friendly dog. Kahn even reconciles with her parents from whom she has been estranged. Using her teaching, friendships, spiritual community, the natural world, and her grown son to keep herself rooted in the present, Kahn is able to explore her past.
Poignant, raw, and at times humorous, Kahn's narrative invites readers to become aware of unconscious cruelty and its sources, to cultivate kindness, and to apply these insights not only to themselves and other humans, but also to the animals who share our lives.
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| Customer Reviews:
Rich in drama, insight and humor June 8, 2009
J. Teller (New York, NY)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
An amazing book, combining raw emotional revelation, a scholar's perspective, and a poet's feel for language in its descriptions of nature. The author is courageously, sometimes harrowingly, honest in the recounting of her year of painful struggle to achieve a harmonious relationship with a difficult dog. Her ultimate, deeply satisfying success in achieving this goal comes through hard-won insight into her own painful childhood. In this story, rich in drama, insight and humor. Kahn will break your heart. But she will also restore your sense of the unity of life, human and animal, individual and universal.
I couldn't put it down! December 17, 2008
Katharine M. Hikel (Hinesburg, Vermont USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Don't be fooled by the pooch on the cover; this is a dog book like 'Moby Dick' is a fish book. Robbie Kahn is an irresistable storyteller, weaving her tale of puppy-keeping into the saga of her prickly family tree; her adventures as a professor and writer; her engaging son Levin, whom we first met in the compelling birth-saga "Bearing Meaning"; her community of friends and counselors; and even her rabbi, in this sprightly, adept story, told through the seasons of one puppy-year. "Milk Teeth" is a charming, loving fable -- with teeth. Caution: Read slowly! You won't want it to end.
Read Every Page December 3, 2008
Marilyn DeMario (Columbia, South Carolina)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Robbie Kahn's first book, "Bearing Meaning" proved to be an important contribution to feminist-American-sociological literature even if a person's child-bearing years were far behind, or one were not a sociologist, or even a feminist. Just so, her new book, "Milk Teeth" should not be taken up only by dog owners, or for that matter, only by dog lovers (although a reader will certainly emerge with a new respect and appreciation for all of us animals).
Just as she did with "Bearing Meaning," Pfeufer Kahn seamlessly weaves personal narrative with ecofeminism, history, sociology, literature, philosophy, religion, spirituality, botany, biology, etc. and all of it so gently and sensually, that we don't realize how profoundly we are being educated. With a deeply literary voice, she both eschews and combines traditional academic separations, and with remarkable courage, breaks new ground in more than one discipline. It is one of those books that makes a reader feel sad as she approaches the last pages.
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