| Pull out the tissues because every one of these books will squeeze your heart, in the best way, of course! And none more so than Abigail Thomas’ memoir, “A Three Dog Life,” published in 2006. When the family beagle darts into traffic one night, Thomas’s husband, Rich dashes after her. The dog is unscathed but Rich is struck and seriously injured, shaking the foundation of their lives and their long marriage. The brain injury will result in paranoia, memory loss and transformation into a man Thomas barely knows. She’ll ground herself with new friends, new dogs and a new way of communicating with the man she has loved for half her life. My next must-read animal memoir is “Rough Magic,” published in 2013 by Lara Prior-Palmer. At 19 years old, Prior-Palmer decides on an impulse to throw her hat into the ring of one of the most punishing horse rides in the world. The Mongol Derby requires riders to race over Mongolian savannas for days astride wild ponies that have personalities of their own. Some are swift, others recalcitrant. Prior-Palmer describes it as “a dance that demands each muscle in your body answer to an ever-shifting floor.” Does she finish? Does she win? You’ll have to read it to know. And finally, if you’ve never read Jane Goodall’s work on her study of the chimpanzees, start with her remarkable memoir, “Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe.” Published in 1990 and full of keen observation and personal reflection, Goodall takes us through her first encounters with the chimps in this lush national park in Tanzania and the course of her study over three decades. She makes an unequivocal case for protection and conservation and, with the hindsight of thirty years of habitat destruction and climate change, her words are even more poignant and urgent today.
— Kerri Miller | MPR News | 