A little editing could have tightened up some repetition in This Dog and it occasionally feels lazy. When he writes about Beacon, the therapy dog that helped the women’s gymnastics team prepare for the 2024 Summer Olympics, it seems odd not to mention that the dog was not allowed to accompany them to Paris, and for Friedman to 'imagine' Simone Biles and Suni Lee’s feelings about Beacon. Why not ask them? ... Quibbles aside, the book is for humans what a chew toy is for a pooch: If you love dogs, I bet you’ll go back to it, again and again, for the great stories about our canine pals ... Friedman skips nimbly from dog-related topic to dog-related topic. Some are serious: how dogs have helped care for soldiers with PTSD, how dog breeding has increased health problems for dogs such as basset hounds ... Mostly, though, This Dog Will Change Your Life is a collection of charming stories.
At its best, Mr. Friedman’s This Dog Will Change Your Life is an exploration of how human dogs really are ... One of Mr. Friedman’s most striking chapters, on adoption and dog shelters, deals with the elements that make a shelter dog more likely to stand out ... It’s a pity, therefore, that much of Mr. Friedman’s book meanders away from this central and provocative throughline ... Often feels like an unnecessary gloss upon the author’s otherwise engaging photographic work ... Distracting, too, is Mr. Friedman’s too-cute insistence on avoiding academic research or jargon ... This lack of focus makes it impossible to tell what kind of book This Dog Will Change Your Life is supposed to be—beyond, one supposes, a requisite extension of an established brand ... Mr. Friedman does, it seems, have a book’s worth of worthwhile things to say. When he gives himself the freedom to write with greater detail and precision about his own artistic process—the act of photographing dogs and how it differs from photographing human subjects—we get a glimpse of the book that might have been ... All too often, alas, the unfocused nature of This Dog Will Change Your Lifemakes the book feel like a requisite gift for self-identified dog-lovers, or The Dogist fans, rather than a book intended to be read.
