Great Grisby

<p>A scholar psychoanalyst and cultural critic explores the multifaceted role dogs play in our world in this charming bestiary of dogs from literature lore and life.</p><p>While gradually unveiling her eight-year love affair with her French bulldog Grisby Mikita Brottman ruminates on the singular bond between dogs and humans. Why do prevailing attitudes warn us against loving our pet too much? Is her relationship with Grisby nourishing or dysfunctional commonplace or unique? Challenging the assumption that there's something repressed and neurotic about those deeply connected to a dog she turns her keen eye on the many ways in which dog is the mirror of man.</p><p><em>The Great Grisby</em> is organized into twenty-six alphabetically arranged chapters each devoted to a particular human-canine union drawn from history art philosophy or literature. Here is Picasso's dachshund Lump; Freud's chow Yofi; Bill Sikes's mutt Bull's Eye in <em>Oliver Twist</em>; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's spaniel Flush whose biography was penned by Virginia Woolf. There are royal dogs like Prince Albert's greyhound Eos and dogs cherished by authors like Thomas Hardy's fox terrier Wessex. Brottman's own beloved Grisby serves as an envoy for sniffing out these remarkable companions.</p><p>Quirky and delightful and peppered with incisive personal reflections and black-and-white sketches portraying a different dog and its owner drawn by the enormously talented Davina Psamophis Falcão <em>The Great Grisby</em> reveals how much dogs have to teach us about empathy happiness love--and what it means to be human.</p>