A Dog Walks Into a Nursing Home
A layabout mutt turned therapy dog leads her owner to a new understanding of the good life.
At loose ends with her daughter leaving home and her husband on the road, Sue Halpern decided to give herself and Pransky, her under-occupied Labradoodle, a new leash—er, lease—on life by getting the two of them certified as a therapy dog team. Smart, spirited, and instinctively compassionate, Pransky turned out to be not only a terrific therapist but an unerring moral compass. In the unlikely sounding arena of a public nursing home, she led her teammate into a series of encounters with the residents that revealed depths of warmth, humor, and insight Halpern hadn’t expected. And little by little, their adventures expanded and illuminated Halpern’s sense of what virtue is and does—how acts of kindness transform the giver as well as the given-to.
Funny, moving, and profound, A Dog Walks into a Nursing Home is the story of how one faithful, charitable, loving, and sometimes prudent mutt—showing great hope, fortitude, and restraint along the way (the occasional begged or stolen treat notwithstanding)—taught a well-meaning woman the true nature and pleasures of the good life.
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Description
*Starred Review* Halpern realized that Pransky, part yellow Lab and part poodle, was so smart and energetic that she was bored in spite of the pleasures of her leash-free Vermont life. As her daughter left for college, Halpern herself feels the need for a new adventure. So she plunges into the rigorous training required for Pransky to become a certified therapy dog. When they begin visiting a nursing home each week, Pransky proves to be a dog of phenomenal empathy, affection, and patience. An immersion writer—Halpern participated in neurological studies for her last book, Can’t Remember What I Forgot (2008)—she is skilled in the art of combining vivid in-the-moment storytelling with thoughtful analysis. She warmly and incisively portrays the people they meet and contemplates the vagaries of memory, the inevitability of loss, and persevering joy. A deeply ethical thinker with a bright sense of humor, Halpern uses the seven virtues as organizing principles, subtly shaping her engrossing account to reveal fresh and provocative aspects of restraint, prudence, faith, fortitude, hope, love, and charity as she addresses the complexities of infirmity, dementia, and death; animal intelligence; and how doing good benefits all involved. The result is a profoundly affecting and edifying chronicle brimming with practical wisdom and things “that were so unexpected they seemed miraculous.” –Donna Seaman
Review
“Time and again, anecdotes bolster her contention that in places where ‘life is in the balance,’ it is possible to get to the essentials about human nature.” —Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Karen White has been narrating audiobooks since 1999, with more than two hundred to her credit. Honored to be included in AudioFile’s Best Voices and Speaking of Audiobooks’s Best Romance Audio 2012 and 2013, she is also an Audie Award finalist and has earned multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards.
Sue Halpern is the author of Four Wings and a Prayer, Migrations to Solitude, and two books of fiction, and she is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College.
