Customer Reviews:
 An unnecessary book November 25, 2008
Elizabeth A. Root (Laurel, MD USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Frankly, I wouldn't recommend reading this, unless one is, for some reason, doing an exhaustive search for everything ever written on dogs. Both the research and the writing are extremely erratic. One only has to compare this to Mary Elizabeth Thurston's The Lost History of the Canine Race: Our 15,000-Year Love Affair With Dogs, published about the same time, to realize how much has been missed. It appears that in many cases, Wendt has read about particular cultures, picking up what they incidentally say about dogs, rather than researching dogs. The result is seriously lacking in detail and precision.
Furthermore, much of the material is out of date. In Chapter Two: "Out of Africa", in which Wendt is discussing the prehistory of humans and dogs, none of the books listed as sources for the chapter are more recent than 1974, twenty-two years before the publication of the book. In this, and other places, Wendt has missed out on a lot of available, more recent, research. The "notes" are more of a chapter bibliography, since they give no pages, not even for the few items footnoted. The copy editting is so sloppy that the title of Ann Robbins' book is omitted (chapter 6), and Josephine Z. Rine's book is listed with two different titles. Moreover, not all of the books are listed among the notes/bibliography, one also needs to read the acknowledgments.
It is not always clear why the book has been divided into chapters. The chapters "The Dogs of War" and "Working Dogs" would seem to be about separate topics, but they cover much the same material. Within any given chapter, times and places are jumbled together. It is almost as if whenever Wendt, in his languid research, came across a fact, he wrote it down, and never reorganized the material. I cannot imagine what the publisher's editor did. The history is often a bit off in its details, as if remembered and not checked. At one point, he refers to the Philip the Great and his son Alexander, meaning, apparently, Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great. The pharaoh usually referred to as Ankhenaten is referred to as Chuen'eten, perhaps the result of relying on a book (Adolph Erman's Agypten und agyptisches Leben in/Life in Egypt) which may have been reprinted by Dover in 1971, but was first published in 1885. This is all made worse by the lack of an index.
The one thing that I liked about the books were the reproductions of ancient and prehistoric artifacts showing people and dogs.
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