A Home for Rose

Sep 22, 2024 3:25 PM

Author:Jon Katz

A Home for Rose

'I believed Rose had a secret plan for the farm, a detailed map in her head that showed exactly where all her ewes and lambs and humans ought to be. Though I was nominally the herder, I wasn't privy to the map. My job was mostly to latch and unlatch the gates, the rest was up to her'

Jon Katz leaves the suburbs for a remote farm in order to give Border Collie puppy Rose - along with our friend Devon from A Dog Year - a true taste of herding life.

Rose's adventures start early, going head to head with a head-butting ram the day the sheep arrive. She soon establishes a routine for the sheep, chickens and donkeys - and Jon - that makes everything run like clockwork. However, any notion Jon has of the romance of a rural idyll is shattered when the snow comes and temperatures of minus twenty set in. With two fingers damaged to frostbite and a sheep lost, the prospect of all-night lambing seems terrifying. But with Rose by his side Jon finds there is little that together they can't do, and as spring comes and the frost thaws he finds himself battered, drained yet exhilarated.

This is his delightfully funny, touching and insightful depiction of the realities of country life, and of how one man turned his life upside down for the love of a dog.

Please note, A Home for Rose is the UK title for the book published in the US as The Dogs of Bedlam Farm.

Reviews

Jon Katz understands dogs as few others do, intuitively and unburdened by sentimentality. His keen insights cut to the heart of the human-pet relationship - its immense joys and painful sorrows. With wisdom and grace, he unlocks the canine soul and the complicated wonders that lie within and offers powerful inights to anyone who has ever struggled with, and loved, a troubled animal

—— John Grogan, author of MARLEY AND ME

Katz's world - of animals and humans and their combined generosity of spirit - is a place you're glad you've been

—— Boston Globe

Made me a Katz fan for life

—— Seattle Times

[Johnson is] an infectiously exciting writer ... The Invention of Air is delightful to read

—— Salon

Packed with excellent stuff

—— Russell Davies

Johnson paints Priestley not as a man of the past but precisely the sort of figure the world needs more than ever

—— New York Post

Compelling

—— Guardian

Pacy, yet full of fascinating scientific digressions

—— Telegraph

Fascinating and wide-ranging account of 'the world's first computer' ... marvellous

—— Daily Mail

A delightful read that will stimulate the scientist inside everyone

—— Bluesci

This slender, elegantly written memoir by a female surgeon, Gabriel Weston, is a fascinating, no holds barred account of life in the operating theatre

—— Independent

Through this insightful book, Weston succeeds superbly in communicating the fascinating brutal reality of a surgeon's life

—— Ian Critchley , Daily Telegraph

Gabriel Weston's story succeeds better than any I have known...more riveting and thought-provoking than any fiction

—— The Lady, Susan Hill

Glinting like a tray of instruments, her prose is satisfyingly precise

—— Victoria Segal , The Guardian

A curiously thrilling read, written with an elegance heightened by its clarity and economy

—— Elizabeth Day , Observer

A valuable and unflinching account, since it so clearly tells the truth

—— Christopher Hart , The Sunday Times

This book is mesmerising

—— William Leith , Scotsman

Her description of the struggle to remain individual and hence moral is her real achievement. This, to me, is what female writing has to do, and she does it with style and humour and beauty

—— Rachel Cusk

Richard Dawkin's new book... gives the fact-rejecters their just deserts

—— Daily Telegraph

The book is full of evidence, some familiar and some new. Its case is presented in a manner succinct, clear and sometimes vivid

—— Daily Telegraph

No other book currently available approaches Dawkin's comprehensive yet accessible treatment of the extraordinarily diverse and massive body of data that drives ineluctably to the same conclusion

—— National Center for Science Education

The Greatest Show on Earth is a lucid, thorough and often exciting survey of evolution and takes in rats' teeth, dogs, bacteria, the so-called missing link, crustaceans, giraffe anatomy, hummingbirds, chimpanzees, enzymes - you name it. It is informed in nearly every paragraph by Mr. Dawkins's irrepressible enthusiasm

—— Sarah Lyall , New York Times

The Greatest Show on Earth... is essential reading. I would currently rate it... as the best overall book on the evidence for Evolution

—— Marc E. Miquel , SCOPE

This is a magnificent book of wonderstanding: Richard Dawkins combines an artist's wonder at the virtuosity of nature with a scientist's understanding of how it comes to be

—— Matt Ridley, author of "Nature via Nurture"

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