When I picked the book I thought this was going to be one of those books about dog behaviour and personality. In our ongoing quest to try to understand our two little dachshunds, we have been diligently picking up this kind of book. But I was wrong. The main title does suggest it's a dog personality book but I didn't read the secondary title carefully enough. The secondary title reveals what the book is really about: self help.

I'm not a big fan of self-help books so it was a bit of a struggle to finish this one. Basically in this book the two authors - Weinstein is the founder of an international management consulgting company and Barber is a philosophy professor - who have been living all their lives with dogs, try to encourage us to live a less stressful life by taking the example of our dogs. For example, according to them dogs know how to love, dogs adapt to change, dogs rejoice in small pleasures, dogs keep hoping, dogs ask for help and that dogs take citicism without resentment, dogs are easily entertain and don't compare themselves to others. In total there are 67 such dog traits that we humans would be wise to follow, all told in short two to three pages of stories or wisdoms that the authors get from their dogs.

While all those advices are obviously good to follow for us to have a healthy, stress free life, and while it's true that our dogs live in the present and lead a much happier life, I can't get rid of the nagging complain in my head which kept coming while reading the book. I can't help to think that the authors read too much in their dogs behaviour and that they try to humanising them too much - putting human thoughts and voice in the dogs' behaviour. Which is what a lot of trainers warn us against. Dogs are dogs and the way the behave shouldn't be read from a human's perspective, they could arise from an altogether different reasons! It is this nagging question and warning that have kept me from accepting what the authors say.

Besides, there are one or two of the alleged dog behaviours which I don't think apply to all dogs, certainly not to ours. For example 'Lesson 50 dogs don't complain about the menu'. Yeah right. Our two little dachshunds Chocolate and Coffee scoff at a cheap dry kibble brand we bought them one day. They just sniffed it and walked away. When their favourite brand appears they gulped it down quickly.

There are some redeeming factors. The book contains a lot of cute photos - albeit black and white at that - of dogs. It also contains a lot of gem quotes. There is a quote for every lesson, and many of them are interesting. Here are some of the ones I like: 'To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs' (Aldous Huxley), 'The dog has seldom been successful in pulling man up to its level of sagacity, but man has frequently dragged a dog down to his' (James Thurber), 'The average dog is a nicer person than the average person' (Andrew A. Rooney), and my absolute favourite in the following: 'Happiness is a warm puppy' (Charles M. Schultz). So true! ( )