MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH GERMAN SHEPHERD DOGS

An autobiographical work offers a love song to German shepherds.

In this slim, well-illustrated book, Brink chronicles her lifelong love affair with German shepherds, extending all the way back to her childhood in the Philippines when her American parents gave her a puppy named Guapa, about whom she retains no memories. What follows is a twinned narrative: Her own autobiography (starting when she was a child during World War II and invading Japanese soldiers took her entire family into custody) and the stories of all the German shepherds who have been there at different stages of her journey. Gerry, the family dog at the moment when Brink and her family were taken away and imprisoned by the Japanese, died at the house gate, pining for them. Readers see the author as a starving graduate student in Boston (“We could only afford peanuts and beer”) with a clever dog named Bitte, and they observe Brink’s beloved Zehren competing in both the American and Canadian Kennel Club contests. The author recounts becoming a professional breeder of German shepherds (“I tried never to deliberately and knowingly breed a dog that would pass along a genetic defect that would cripple, deform, or kill its offspring,” she assures readers). And Brink discusses her later years, when mobility problems stopped her from keeping any more German shepherds. (She recounts that she still visited the neighborhood park to get her “dog fix.”) This twofold life story is awkward but surprisingly effective. Because the author uses plenty of family photographs of the canines and a simple, unadorned prose style, she manages to transform her dog-by-dog account into something that feels curiously universal. How many of her readers can likewise chart their entire lives by the canines that accompanied them along the way? This warm, inviting book is aimed directly at those readers.

An engaging account of a life spent loving one great breed of dog.