Elias Weiss Friedman and Ben Greenman / Ballantine Books / 270 pages
Elias Weiss Friedman—creator of the wildly popular social media brand, The Dogist—begins This Dog Will Change Your Life by describing how his Labrador retriever, Oreo, saved his life when he was a toddler by herding him back on the sidewalk after he got lost in the neighborhood. The book, written with former New Yorker editor Ben Greenman, also explores the myriad not-so-dramatic ways that dogs enhance our lives—teaching us about personal identity, relationships, purpose, and the importance of taking a breather (“a place to… paws,” as Weiss Freidman puts it).
After being downsized from a marketing job, Weiss Friedman started The Dogist on Instagram in 2013, snapping photographs of delightful pooches on the streets of Manhattan with blurbs about what makes them tick (e.g., Asta, a Kerry blue terrier, enjoys skateboards and stinky cheese). Today, the “dogumentarian” boasts more than 10 million followers across online platforms and is a regular photographer at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show and the Puppy Bowl.
Diehard Dogist fans will likely appreciate the collection of personal and professional vignettes in This Dog Will Change Your Life. (Readers expecting adorable images of dogs, however, will have to pick up the author’s other two books: The Dogist: Photographic Encounters with 1,000 Dogs and The Dogist Puppies.) This book can feel disjointed and even jarring at times—jumping from veterinarian suicide rates, to the merits of search-and-rescue dogs, to a quail hunt in which Weiss Friedman happily participated. Overall, though, the book is about how dogs make us better. “We can say for certain that there would have been no dogs without humans,” Weiss Friedman observes. “But there might also have been no humanity without dogs.”