Here are 100 books that Being a Dog fans have personally recommended if you like
Being a Dog.
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I have always been infatuated with smells, as many childhood photos of me with my nose stuck in something can prove. However, I did not consider studying olfaction as a primary area of research until mid-way through my PhD. As a full-time student, part-time lecturer, and primary caregiver to an inquisitive, energetic toddler at that time, I needed to gain a background understanding of smell as quickly and efficiently as possible. Thus began my obsession with books on smell, taste, and flavor. At the start of the millennia, the area was still small and has since blossomed, allowing me to continue to read books about smell for pleasure in my downtime.
When I started getting interested in smell as my primary area of research this was one of the first books I picked up and what a fantastic introduction. The material is written in a straightforward fashion that anyone with an interest in smell can easily digest.
Gilbert’s vast scientific experience allows him to pen engaging prose that provide the reader with an intricate and nuanced understanding of the science of smell that is far from just introductory. The book is a little old, it is aging well and hopefully it will entice you to learn even more about the chemosciences. So much exciting cutting-edge research has come out in these past few years.
Everything about the sense of smell fascinates us, from its power to evoke memories to its ability to change our moods and influence our behavior. Yet because it is the least understood of the senses, myths abound. For example, contrary to popular belief, the human nose is almost as sensitive as the noses of many animals, including dogs; blind people do not have enhanced powers of smell; and perfumers excel at their jobs not because they have superior noses, but because they have perfected the art of thinking about scents.In this entertaining and enlightening journey through the world of aroma,…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I have always been infatuated with smells, as many childhood photos of me with my nose stuck in something can prove. However, I did not consider studying olfaction as a primary area of research until mid-way through my PhD. As a full-time student, part-time lecturer, and primary caregiver to an inquisitive, energetic toddler at that time, I needed to gain a background understanding of smell as quickly and efficiently as possible. Thus began my obsession with books on smell, taste, and flavor. At the start of the millennia, the area was still small and has since blossomed, allowing me to continue to read books about smell for pleasure in my downtime.
This is one of my favorite books about food in the past couple of years. Chinese cuisine has always fascinated me based on its breadth of styles, techniques, and depth of flavor. Not to mention that Chinese takeout generates some of my strongest autobiographic olfactory memories from childhood. Yet, until this book, learning about Chinese food has always been daunting to me.
Dunlop’s enjoyable coverage provides a wonderful overview of the difference between regional cuisines, use of ingredients, flavors, cooking techniques, and philosophy of food. It was not just a true joy to read, but it also inspired me to try cooking at home. And luckily, Dunlop’s got that covered as well with Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking.
Chinese was the earliest truly global cuisine. When the first Chinese laborers began to settle abroad, restaurants appeared in their wake. Yet Chinese has the curious distinction of being both one of the world's best-loved culinary traditions and one of the least understood. For more than a century, the overwhelming dominance of a simplified form of Cantonese cooking ensured that few foreigners experienced anything of its richness and sophistication-but today that is beginning to change.
In Invitation to a Banquet, award-winning cook and writer Fuchsia Dunlop explores the history, philosophy, and techniques of Chinese culinary culture. In each chapter, she…
I have always been infatuated with smells, as many childhood photos of me with my nose stuck in something can prove. However, I did not consider studying olfaction as a primary area of research until mid-way through my PhD. As a full-time student, part-time lecturer, and primary caregiver to an inquisitive, energetic toddler at that time, I needed to gain a background understanding of smell as quickly and efficiently as possible. Thus began my obsession with books on smell, taste, and flavor. At the start of the millennia, the area was still small and has since blossomed, allowing me to continue to read books about smell for pleasure in my downtime.
This is a fantastic introduction to the history of smell. Despite being willing to read most anything written about smell, I usually balk at historical texts as often these have a soporific effect on me. However, this historical coverage kept me engaged from start to finish.
The chapters on early religious incense practices and the perfume trade throughout the Middle East and Europe are edifying. I learned a great deal about the impact of the economics of perfume on shifting trade routes, which is something I hadn’t come across in other books on smell. What truly grabbed my attention and formed the basis for many conversations when reading Past Scents were the chapters relating smell to race, gender, and class throughout recent American history.
Since the historical focus is predominantly Western, you might also want to consider reading Sandalwood and Carrion: Smell in Indian Religion and Culture by James McHugh.
In this comprehensive and engaging volume, medical historian Jonathan Reinarz offers a historiography of smell from ancient to modern times. Synthesizing existing scholarship in the field, he shows how people have relied on their olfactory sense to understand and engage with both their immediate environments and wider corporal and spiritual worlds.
This broad survey demonstrates how each community or commodity possesses, or has been thought to possess, its own peculiar scent. Through the meanings associated with smells, osmologies develop--what cultural anthropologists have termed the systems that utilize smells to classify people and objects in ways that define their relations to…
The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More
by
Meredith Marple,
The coastal tourist town of Great Wharf, Maine, boasts a crime rate so low you might suspect someone’s lying.
Nevertheless, jobless empty nester Mallory Cooper has become increasingly reclusive and fearful. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, Mallory misses her happier self—and so…
I have always been infatuated with smells, as many childhood photos of me with my nose stuck in something can prove. However, I did not consider studying olfaction as a primary area of research until mid-way through my PhD. As a full-time student, part-time lecturer, and primary caregiver to an inquisitive, energetic toddler at that time, I needed to gain a background understanding of smell as quickly and efficiently as possible. Thus began my obsession with books on smell, taste, and flavor. At the start of the millennia, the area was still small and has since blossomed, allowing me to continue to read books about smell for pleasure in my downtime.
Eating, one of my favorite daily rituals, is contiguous with my love of smelling and cooking. Most of what we consider to be the flavor of food arises from retronasal olfaction (the olfactory pathway from the back of the nose). And a great deal of our gustatory experiences are created from a confluence of multiple sensory channels within our headspace.
This piece of knowledge and many others are wonderfully covered in this book. Bringing to bear his cutting-edge research on mutli-modal perception, Spence provides what is to my mind the most enjoyable scientific introduction of gustatory perception and in particular an in depth explanation of why eating and drinking, when done well, are on of life’s greatest (multi-modal) pleasures.
A ground-breaking book by the world-leading expert in sensory science: Freakonomics for food
'Popular science at its best' - Daniel Levitin
Why do we consume 35% more food when eating with one more person, and 75% more when with three?
Why are 27% of drinks bought on aeroplanes tomato juice?
How are chefs and companies planning to transform our dining experiences, and what can we learn from their cutting-edge insights to make memorable meals at home?
These are just some of the ingredients of Gastrophysics, in which the pioneering Oxford professor Charles Spence shows how our senses link up in…
As a professional dog trainer, volunteer foster home for rescue dogs, and a dog owner myself, understanding the canine mind is a passion for me. Helping people live more harmoniously with their dogs drives me to read, learn, and apply what the experts in the field are offering. Any book that gives credible insight into the behavior, thoughts, and feelings of dogs brings us closer to deepening our relationship with them, improving our communication with them, and solving behavior problems in ways that are effective, intelligent, and humane.
The detailed descriptions of the inner workings of each of a dog’s senses are fascinating to me. I often go back to reread those sections. This book gave me much greater insight into how truly different the beasts I share my home with really are.
Knowing the science behind why dogs do what they do allows me to see their dog-ness more clearly rather than relating to them as just my adorable pets (which, of course, they also are!).
As an unabashed dog lover, Alexandra Horowitz is naturally curious about what her dog thinks and what she knows. As a cognitive scientist she is intent on understanding the minds of animals who cannot say what they know or feel.
This is a fresh look at the world of dogs -- from the dog's point of view. The book introduces the reader to the science of the dog -- their perceptual and cognitive abilities -- and uses that introduction to draw a picture of what it might be like to bea dog. It answers questions no other dog book can…
I'm a lifelong dog lover and the author of four nonfiction books. I currently live with two rescue dogs, Marlowe and Nuka (the unofficial co-authors of my book). I decided to write a self-help book after noticing two trends during the recent pandemic: people were struggling to feel happy and optimistic, and people were adding a dog to their household, many for the first time. We all marvel at how our dogs find it so easy to enjoy life, and I was determined to find out what we could learn from them! During my research, I learned so much about how dogs think and feel, and I love sharing this information with other dog lovers.
Dr. Stanley Coren has been studying dogs for decades, and he has written many books on the subject.
It was hard to choose just one for this list, but I really liked the format of Do Dogs Dream? It answers some of the most common questions about dog behavior and communication in short, simple chapters. If you’ve ever been curious about why your dog does what they do, you’ll be very likely to find the answer in this book.
This book is no doubt a response to the hundreds of questions people asked him over the years. Compiling a volume with the most popular topics, he has presented a primer on understanding your dog.
Do dogs dream? Can they recognize themselves in the mirror or understand what they're seeing on television? Are they more intelligent than cats? People have a great curiosity-and many misunderstandings-about how dogs think, act, and perceive the world. They also wonder about the social and emotional lives of dogs. Stanley Coren brings decades of scientific research on dogs to bear in his unprecedented foray into the inner lives of our canine companions, dispelling many common myths in the process. In a conversational Q&A format with illustrations, Coren answers approximately 75 questions often asked of him during his nearly fifty-year career…
Don’t mess with the hothead—or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of…
For most of my life no one guessed I could fall for a dog, much less write a book about one. I associated dogs with drool on the floor and fur all over everything. One of those “just a dog” people, I thought the marriage bed should be strictly for humans. It crossed my mind that an eager dog would keep me from working into the night at the office where I ran Chatelaine, Canada’s premier magazine for women, but I chose a treadmill at the Y over rambles with a dog. At 65 I discovered my inner dog person. A ragged-eared mutt is now my joy and my muse.
TV’s Lassie saved children from wildfire and quicksand. Real-life service dogs save entire families from the isolation and stress of a child’s incurable illness or severe disability.
Through the vivid stories of compromised kids who blossom with highly trained dogs, Greene celebrates the canine gift for understanding us humans—rooted in 10,000 years of interspecies history but ignored by science until the recent past.
This book gripped, moved, and informed me while hitting close to home. Like my own rescue mutt, many service dogs were trained by prisoners who discovered their own best selves by teaching an unwanted animal to love. Humans and dogs need each other, as Greene shows with heartfelt but rigorous reporting.
THE UNDERDOGS tells the story of Karen Shirk: felled at age 24 by a neuromuscular disease and facing life as an immobile, deeply isolated and depressed, ventilator-dependent patient, 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 broken children and their…
I'm a lifelong dog lover and the author of four nonfiction books. I currently live with two rescue dogs, Marlowe and Nuka (the unofficial co-authors of my book). I decided to write a self-help book after noticing two trends during the recent pandemic: people were struggling to feel happy and optimistic, and people were adding a dog to their household, many for the first time. We all marvel at how our dogs find it so easy to enjoy life, and I was determined to find out what we could learn from them! During my research, I learned so much about how dogs think and feel, and I love sharing this information with other dog lovers.
“A dog’s feelings matter to them, and they should also matter to us.” This quote from Dr. Marc Bekoff’s new book, Dogs Demystified, sums up his longtime advocacy for dogs and other animals.
He respects them as thoughtful beings with full emotional lives, and strongly believes that every individual animal matters, whether a household pet or a wild predator.
Bekoff has been writing about animals for a long time, and this book on dogs is an effort to whittle down his vast knowledge into a manageable read. If you feel a lot of empathy toward dogs and other animals, you will definitely enjoy reading Marc Bekoff’s books, including Dogs Demystified.
The book also features a foreword from the incredible Jane Goodall and illustrations by 1960s folk music icon Joan Baez.
An all-encompassing and fun reference from an award-winning scientist and dog lover
Dr. Marc Bekoff is an expert at turning cutting-edge science into practical, reader-friendly information. The encyclopedic entries in this book cover everything related to dog care, dog-human relationships, and dog behavior, cognition, and emotions, making this the accessible book that every dog lover should have. In concise, readable A-through-Z entries, Bekoff covers it all, from aggression to pack formation to zoomies, and explores why dogs do what they do; exactly how to meet any dog eye-to-eye, nose-to-nose, and ear-to-ear to understand their world better; and how tuning in…
As a professional dog trainer, volunteer foster home for rescue dogs, and a dog owner myself, understanding the canine mind is a passion for me. Helping people live more harmoniously with their dogs drives me to read, learn, and apply what the experts in the field are offering. Any book that gives credible insight into the behavior, thoughts, and feelings of dogs brings us closer to deepening our relationship with them, improving our communication with them, and solving behavior problems in ways that are effective, intelligent, and humane.
What is cool about this book is that most of the chapters start with a common question from a regular person—not a dog trainer or professional. I bought this book early in my training career, and I enjoyed reading the questions, formulating my own answers, and then checking them to see how well they matched Donaldson’s. I learned a lot!
Jean Donaldson is widely recognized as one of the most influential leaders in the fields of canine behavior and dog training. Known for her rigorous scientific thinking, Jean turns her attention in her latest book to questions and issues that touch on a wide variety of topics of interest to dog professionals and enthusiasts. Readers will be challenged to think, to learn how to separate fact from myth, and evaluate the variety training methods currently being espoused in the popular media. Oh Behave! contains a series of 55 articles, grouped into six sections: Behavior, Training, Behavior Problems, Fear and Anxiety,…
As far back as I can remember I’ve always loved canines and always wanted to make sure they were
treated kindly. When I
was a kid, I would bring a bag of dog treats with me to visit family and
friends that I knew had dogs; I had to be very convincing too, or else people
would’ve thought they were for me! But they could see it was a delight for me; while everyone would be inside
talking, I would be outside with the pups. Eventually, this enthusiasm
culminated with the creation of Nate Schoemer’s Dog Training Program, with a mission of improving the lives of dogs and their owners through
education.
This
book is hands down one of those essential readings that every dog owner should
own…it should be read, re-read, and then re-re-read.
Patricia beautifully describes our dog’s emotions, body language, and even the
more subtle expressions that most people miss… it’s like training to be a doggy
empath.
I found myself smiling and learning something new and valuable in every
chapter, even after being a professional dog trainer for over ten years.
We
love our dogs, and they depend on us to care for them and understand them. This
book is not only a page-turner, but it will enhance the relationship that you
have with your furry-faced friend.
Yes, humans and canines are different species, but current research provides fascinating, irrefutable evidence that what we share with our dogs is greater than how we vary. As behaviorist and zoologist Dr. Patricia McConnell tells us in this remarkable new book about emotions in dogs and in people, more and more scientists accept the premise that dogs have rich emotional lives, exhibiting a wide range of feelings including fear, anger, surprise, sadness, and love.
In For the Love of a Dog, McConnell suggests that one of the reasons we love dogs so much is that they express emotions in ways…
