Talking to Animals
How You Can Understand Animals and They Can Understand You
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- ¥1,700
発行者による作品情報
New York Times bestselling author Jon Katz—“a Thoreau for modern times” (San Antonio Express-News)—offers us a deeper understanding of the inner lives of animals and teaches us how we can more effectively communicate with them, made real by his own remarkable experiences with a wide array of creatures great and small.
In Talking to Animals, journalist Jon Katz—who left his Manhattan life behind two decades ago for life on a farm where he is surrounded by dogs, cats, sheep, horses, cows, goats, and chickens—marshals his experience to offer us a deeper insight into animals and the tools needed for effectively communicating with them.
Devoting each chapter to a specific animal from his life, Katz tells funny and illuminating stories about his profound experiences with them, showing us how healthy engagement with animals falls into five key areas: Food, Movement, Visualization, Language, and Instincts. Along the way, we meet Simon the donkey who arrives at Katz’s farm near death and now serves as his Tai Chi partner. We meet Red the dog who started out antisocial and untrained and is now a therapy dog working with veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. And we meet Winston, the dignified and brave rooster who was injured defending his hens from a hawk and who has better interpersonal skills than most humans.
Thoughtful and intelligent, lively and powerful, this book will completely change the way you think about and interact with animals. Katz’s “honest, straightforward, and sometimes searing prose will speak to those who love animals, and might well convert some who do not” (Booklist).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestseller Katz (Saving Simon) fills his latest book with moving essays on what he has learned from different animals. Each story combines biographies of beloved animals with guidance on how humans can better communicate with them, conveying Katz's message that humans must respect animals for what they are before real connections can be made. To begin a successful relationship, Katz urges readers to "consistently imagine and visualize the behavior seek from dog, and over time, the dog senses it, understands it, and then internalizes it." Katz's visualization process, based on the work by animal behaviorist Temple Grandin on how animals perceive the world, comes across as thought-sharing with animals. When Katz has to choose whether to permanently confine Orson, a border collie, or put him down, the communication between the two and a visualization of Orson by a stream allows Katz to release Orson. Katz is most successful when relating the sometimes heartbreaking stories of animals or urging readers to consider how animals perceive the world; he's less skilled at providing concrete tools to learn to better interact with the animals in our own lives.
