Deborah Thompson

Told from the perspective of a self-identified “crazy dog lady,” these eleven interconnected essays follow one woman’s relations with five different dogs. Together, they travel over terrain spanning her husband’s battle with cancer, his death, her grieving process, and her rejoining the living as her dogs lead her forward from the other end of their leashes. Alongside her personal story, she considers such cultural issues as Americans’ unhealthy relationships with the natural world, ageism across species, poverty and privilege, hoarding, and the meaning of happiness. This is not a sentimental “who-rescued-whom?” book about the healing power of animals. Instead, it explores one representative human’s relationships with dogs, with all their joys but also their frustrations, neuroses, and downright craziness.

What do dogs mean in America? How do Americans make meaning through their dogs? The United States has long expressed its cultural unconscious through canine iconography. Through our dogs, we figure out what we're thinking and who we are, representing by proxy the things that we don't quite want to recognize in ourselves. Often, it's a specific breed or type of dog that serves as an informal cultural mascot, embodying an era's needs, fears, desires, longings, aspirations, repressions, and hopeless contradictions. Combining cultural studies with personal narrative, this book creates a playful, speculative reading of American culture through its canine self-representations. Looking at seven different breeds or types over the last seven decades, readers will go on an intellectual dog walk through some of the mazes of American cultural mythology.

Animal disorders-those erratic, contradictory, irrational relationships that humans have with their nonhuman compatriots-abound in contemporary U.S. culture. In a series of personal essays, Deborah Thompson relates her own complicity in some of these disordered approaches to nonhuman animals, including such practices as pet-keeping, animal hoarding, animal sacrifice (both religious and scientific), magical thinking, and grieving. The sometimes funny, sometimes poignant essays in this collection deliver dispatches from one representative sufferer of animal disorders."ANIMAL DISORDERS is a compassionate but clear-eyed critique of the contradictions and hypocrisies embedded in humankind's messy relationship with animals. In reflective, lovely, often funny prose, Deborah Thompson explores the deep emotions that animals evoke in us, and the ways that emotion, especially grief, upends our beliefs about animals, about ourselves, and about our place in the world."--Claire Boyles, author of Site Fidelity

This book was written with the hope that you will find yourselves somewhere within the pages for inspiration, laughter, clarification, and/or hope. I have chosen to organize the pages so that the reader could enjoy the various styles from a serious point of view to justifying the Insanity with laughter as nothing should be taken. So serious that you can not laugh. It is entitled "No Trail To Follow" because there should be no looking back.

This book was written with the hope that you will find yourselves somewhere within the pages for inspiration, laughter, clarification, and/or hope. I have chosen to organize the pages so that the reader could enjoy the various styles from a serious point of view to justifying the Insanity with laughter as nothing should be taken. So serious that you can not laugh. It is entitled "No Trail To Follow" because there should be no looking back.

The introduction of the new General Medical Services contract for the payment and reward of general practice and GP practices will inevitably change the way in which primary care is delivered. This practical workbook aims to address how its implementation will work in practice. Written in the interactive Roy Lilley workbook style with think boxes hazard warnings tips and comment boxes it deals with the implications impact and implementation of the New Contract questioning the contract's impact on patients and the provision of services. It is an essential guide for general practitioners primary care managers practice staff and trainers; and for all those that have an involvement in primary care and the implementation of the new contract. GPs practices and PCOs need as much guidance as they can get - from the General Practitioners Committee the NHS Confederation and also from books such as this. The more advice that they can turn to and the earlier they can get the help they need the better. So I welcome Roy's book as a valuable contribution. The book is primarily an informative summary of the contract documents and a practical tool kit for putting the contract into action. I too want to see practice teams making the contract work and this book will help many of them to do so. John Chisholm in the Foreword