Jon Katz

Do animals have souls? Some of our greatest thinkers--Aristotle, Plato, Thomas Aquinas--and countless animal lovers have been obsessed with this question for thousands of years. Now New York Times bestselling author Jon Katz looks for an answer and finds even more questions as he recounts the lives and stories of the residents of his celebrated Bedlam Farm: Rose, his beloved workaholic sheepdog who runs the farm, and an array of gentle donkeys, industrious chickens, docile sheep, obnoxious goats, and a murderous yet loving barn cat.Do these remarkable creatures have consciences? Do they possess free will and reason? Do they have a sense of self, or an existence in the spirit world? Do they shape their own lives? Or are we projecting onto them traits we want and need them to have, allowing ourselves to be manipulated into trading food and shelter for what we see as unconditional love?With his signature wisdom, humor, and clarity, Katz relates the stories of the animals he lives with and finds remarkable kinships at every turn. Whether it is Rose's brilliant and methodical herding ability, Mother the cat's keen mousing instincts, or Izzy's canine compassion toward hospice patients, Katz is mesmerized to see in them individual personas and sparks of self-awareness. He marvels, too, at the distinctions between the species--our desire to change and our ability to edit and censor ourselves, and their capacity to live in the now. And yet the differences never keep Katz from fully enjoying, loving, and cherishing his unusual cast of Bedlam Farm characters. Katz's reflections on this eternal debate will resonate with anyone who loves dogs, cats, or other animals--and who wonders about the spirits that animate them and the deepening hold they have on our emotional lives."If no two dogs are alike," Katz says, "neither is there a universal relationship with them." Such an observation helps to shine a light on the powerful interspecies connection that is redefining the human-animal bond in our time.From the Hardcover edition.

In his previous books, New York Times bestselling author Jon Katz introduced us to the delightful menagerie at Bedlam Farm, including Izzy, the unforgettable border collie rescue. Now, in Izzy & Lenore, Katz delves deeper into his connection with the beautiful, once-abandoned dog, learning yet again about the unexpected places animals can take us. Affectionate and intuitive, Izzy is unlike any dog Katz has encountered, and the two undertake a journey Katz could not have imagined without the arrival of a new companion: a spirited, bright-eyed black Labrador puppy named Lenore.As trained hospice volunteers visiting homes and nursing facilities in upstate New York, Katz and Izzy bring comfort and canine companionship to people who most need it. An eighty-year-old Alzheimer's patient smiles for the first time in months when she feels Izzy's soft fur. A retired logger joyfully remembers his own beloved dog when he sees Izzy. As Izzy bonds with patients and Katz focuses on their families, the author begins to come to terms with his own life, discovering dark realities he has never confronted. Meanwhile, Lenore--quickly dubbed the Hound of Love--arrives at Bedlam. Her genial personality and boundless capacity for affection steer Katz out of the shadows, rekindle his love of working with dogs, and restore his connection to the farm and the animals and people around him.Humorous and deeply moving, Izzy & Lenore is a story of a man confronting his past, embracing the blessings of his current life, and rediscovering the meaning of friendship, family, and faith. Katz shares an uplifting tale of love, compassion, and the rich and complex relationships between dogs and their humans.From the Hardcover edition.

"People who love dogs often talk about a 'lifetime' dog. I'd heard the phrase a dozen times before I came to recognize its significance. Lifetime dogs are dogs we love in especially powerful, sometimes inexplicable ways."--Jon KatzIn this gripping and deeply touching book, bestselling author Jon Katz tells the story of his lifetime dog, Orson: a beautiful border collie--intense, smart, crazy, and unforgettable.From the moment Katz and Orson meet, when the dog springs from his traveling crate at Newark airport and panics the baggage claim area, their relationship is deep, stormy, and loving. At two years old, Katz's new companion is a great herder of school buses, a scholar of refrigerators, but a dud at herding sheep. Everything Katz attempts-- obedience training, herding instruction, a new name, acupuncture, herb and alternative therapies--helps a little but not enough, and not for long. "Like all border collies and many dogs," Katz writes, "he needed work. I didn't realize for some time I was the work Orson would find."While Katz is trying to help his dog, Orson is helping him, shepherding him toward a new life on a two-hundred-year-old hillside farm in upstate New York. There, aided by good neighbors and a tolerant wife, hip-deep in sheep, chickens, donkeys, and more dogs, the man and his canine companion explore meadows, woods, and even stars, wade through snow, bask by a roaring wood stove, and struggle to keep faith with each other. There, with deep love, each embraces his unfolding destiny. A Good Dog is a book to savor. Just as Orson was the author's lifetime dog, his story is a lifetime treasure--poignant, timeless, and powerful.From the Hardcover edition.

"Sometimes human-dog relationships are simple, unrelated to the emotional lives and histories of either species. But often people acquire and love dogs with little awareness that they might have complex and revealing reasons for choosing the dog or pet they choose, loving it the way they do."Writing about his own dogs in A Dog Year, Jon Katz became immersed in a larger community of dog lovers and came to realize that in an increasingly fragmented and disconnected society, dogs are often treated not as pets, but as family members and human surrogates. The New Work of Dogs profiles a dozen such relationships in a New Jersey town, like the story of Harry, a Welsh corgi who provides sustaining emotional strength for a woman battling terminal breast cancer; Cherokee, companion of a man who has few human friends and doesn't know how to talk to his own family; the Divorced Dogs Club, whose funny, acerbic, and sometimes angry women turn to their dogs to help them rebuild their lives; and Betty Jean, the frantic founder of a tiny rescue group that has saved five hundred dogs from abuse or abandonment in recent years.Drawn from hundreds of interviews and conversations with dog owners and lovers, breeders, veterinarians, rescuers, trainers, behaviorists, and psychiatrists, The New Work of Dogs combines compelling personal narratives with a penetrating look at human/animal attachment, and questions whether this relationship shift is an entirely positive phenomenon for both species. Katz offers us a portrait of a community, and by extension a country, that is turning to its pets for emotional support and stability--a difficult job that more and more dogs are expected to do every day. The New Work of Dogs is a provocative and moving exploration of the evolving role dogs play in a changing and uncertain world.From the Hardcover edition.

The book that inspired Marley and Me, published in the UK for the first time.When Jon Katz takes in a young troubled border collie, his calm, sedate life will never be the same again. Jon and his wife live in a New Jersey suburb with two perfectly behaved Labradors. Then into the mix comes Devon, who creates havoc from the moment he arrives at the airport, when it takes Jon, two baggage handlers and three police officers to track him down after he escapes.Jon learns the hard way how to encourage Devon to behave. But amongst the difficulties of their first year together, Jon discovers his life is enlivened by a creature with so much mischievousness and joie de vivre. In fact, Jon finds that he is to change as much as Devon.By turns insightful, hilarious and deeply moving, A Dog Year is a delightful true story of the age-old bond between man and dog.

"Jesse and Eric were roommates in the tiny town of Caldwell, Idaho, two nineteen-year-old working-class kids squeezing out a living with their seven-dollar-an-hour jobs selling and fixing computers. College was never in the cards. They spent every spare cent on their computers, and every spare moment online.". "Jesse and Eric were geeks - suspicious or disdainful of authority figures, proud of their status as outsiders, fervent in their belief in the positive power of technology. They'd been outsiders as long as they could remember, living far from the mainstream of school or town life. Nobody spoke for them; they were on nobody's social or political agenda.". "Geeks is the story of how Jesse and Eric - and others like them - used technology to make it possible to change their lives and alter their destiny. They rode the Internet out of Idaho to Chicago, a city they had never seen, searching for the American dream, a better life. Geeks tells of this brave and difficult journey, as two self-described social misfits use the resources of the Internet to try to construct a new future for themselves, escape the boundaries of their dead-end lives, and find a community they can belong to.". "Geeks explores a growing subculture about which many of us know little, a world with its own language, traditions, and taboos. In telling the stories of Jesse, Eric, and others like them, Geeks reveals the very human face of technology."--BOOK JACKET.

This book is for nervous parents, neo-Luddites, kids, journalists, rappers, intellectuals, digital wanna-bes, Webheads, MTV users and banners, Beavis & Butt-head fans, survivors of the 1996 presidential election and buyers of William Bennett's moral fables. Here's some of what it's about:. Public discussions of culture and new media are hysterical, confusing and irrational. We have to start over. We blame our ascending, technologically distributed culture - music, TV. Shows, movies, computers - for crime, civic apathy and other social woes, while their complex causes and expensive solutions are ignored. Journalism has lost its moral moorings. Its new corporate owners have taken it far from its original purpose, as practiced by Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, and transformed it into a timid, stuffy, "objective" and increasingly destructive entity. We need to understand the good things the information revolution is bringing and not. Just wring our hands over the bad. Consider the way interactivity is democratizing the spread of information. How the Internet is transforming science and research. How individuals can now carry on their own dialogues, instead of submitting to the suffocating dictates of three networks and a few newspapers. How citizens have the machinery to join in the discussions of political life. Children need more, not less, access to technology, culture and information. We have. Been led into a false choice - the old culture versus the new - by shallow politicians and manipulable journalists. Sensible people can pick what they want and need from both cultures, each offering vast amounts of both excellence and garbage.

Presents the story of misfit black lab Lenore, who is ignored by the unwelcoming and busy animals at Bedlam Farm until she playfully licks a grumpy ram with whom she forges an unlikely friendship.

Feeling like an outsider when she visits her relatives in Puerto Rico for the first time, eleven-year-old Felita tries to come to terms with the heritage she always took for granted.