“Bird lovers may blanch at feather-in-the-mouth hunting tales, but this selection of vignettes is varied, entertaining and frequently heartwarming.” from good dog
THE SOCIAL LIFE OF MONEY
a partisan perspective that maintains, “social media promotes warfare,” and that, as with guerrilla warfare, “David has become Goliath, and Goliath has become David.” More an illumination of the challenge than a pat solution.
GOOD DOG True Stories of Love, Loss, and Loyalty
DiBenedetto, David—Ed. Harper Wave/HarperCollins (336 pp.) $25.99 | Oct. 21, 2014 978-0-06-224235-8
A sparkling collection of 51 dog stories that have regularly appeared in the eponymous columns of Garden & Gun since its launch in 2007. DiBenedetto (On the Run: An Angler’s Journey Down the Striper Coast, 2003), the magazine’s editor in chief, explains the rationale behind the selections chosen by the editors. “[Our] Holy Trinity is bourbon, dogs, and barbecue, but dogs truly reign supreme,” he jokes. These are not your stereotypical lap dogs. In “Hurricane Muffin,” Katie Crouch writes, “[e]ven when he was a puppy, Muffin our cairn terrier, was yappy and mean, calculating and chewy.” Nonetheless, he showed his mettle when he herded the family to the only safe spot in their house during a fierce hurricane. Logan Ward describes how his first dog was a toy poodle, “a fur ball the color of a Hershey’s Kiss and only slightly bigger,” whom he named Tom—Thomas Thumb Ward. Despite his diminutive size, Tom became an avid bird dog. In “Training Days,” DiBenedetto gives an amusing account of a yellow Labrador who only “retrieved one duck in his gundog career.” His claim to fame was that, after being neutered, he would run away, heading back to the vet’s office: “Well, we liked to say he was looking for his balls.” The role of a companion dog is a recurrent theme. In “A Marriage for the Dogs,” Jill McCorkle discusses the problem of modern blended families. “When my husband and I got married,” she writes, “we were as concerned about merging our dogs as we were our children.” On a different note, Jack Hitt uses a personal anecdote to suggest that veterinary medicine can become prohibitively expensive and is not necessarily required. Other contributors include Ace Atkins, Rick Bragg, Roy Blount Jr., Jon Meacham and Julia Reed. Bird lovers may blanch at feather-in-the-mouth hunting tales, but this selection of vignettes is varied, entertaining and frequently heartwarming.
Dodd, Nigel Princeton Univ. (480 pp.) $35.00 | Sep. 28, 2014 978-0-691-14142-8
A sociologist takes a broad new view of the nature, value and history of money. In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, with its attendant bank failures and economic downturn, Dodd (Sociology/London School of Economics; Social Theory and Modernity, 1999, etc.) claims that it is time to reconsider the nature of money. The idea of money has reached a tipping point, with new forms and systems quickly proliferating. In this authoritative work, the author examines the ideas of specialists against those of an array of social and cultural theorists, philosophers and literary critics—individuals who have written about money but are not monetary theorists—from Friedrich Nietzsche (“The educated classes are being swept along by a hugely contemptible money economy. The world has never been more worldly, never poorer in love and goodness”) to Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida and Michael Hardt. Much of Dodd’s analysis focuses on money’s role in our lives, beginning with the German sociologist Georg Simmel’s argument that it is a claim upon society. The monetary crisis, writes Dodd, has revealed “the social life of money, i.e., the complex and dynamic configuration of social, economic, and political relations on which money depends.” To offer this more nuanced view, he discusses the origins of money, the renewed interest in Marxian theory and the relationship of money to culture, decadence, waste and territory. While culture is “important to understanding the ways in which people shape money for themselves, bending it to their own purposes,” the cultural context has been “glaring” in its absence from mainstream discussion. In a chapter on the possible transformation of money, the author considers mobile money, Bitcoin, social lending and other alternative money systems. An exhaustive analysis of money as a complex social process—not a thing—that will appeal to scholars in many fields.
EUGENE O’NEILL A Life in Four Acts
Dowling, Robert M. Yale Univ. (584 pp.) $35.00 | Oct. 28, 2014 978-0-300-17033-7
A portrait of a playwright inspired by suffering. When Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) began writing plays in 1913, American theater featured hackneyed melodramas with audience-pleasing happy endings. O’Neill’s dark themes— oppression, racism, alienation—and innovative staging revolutionized the genre, paving the way for such later iconoclasts as 52
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15 september 2014
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nonfiction
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kirkus.com
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