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Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog Paperback – March 11, 2008
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The heartwarming and unforgettable story of a family and the wondrously neurotic dog who taught them what really matters in life. Now with photos and new material.
Is it possible for humans to discover the key to happiness through a bigger-than-life, bad-boy dog? Just ask the Grogans.
John and Jenny were just beginning their life together. They were young and in love, with not a care in the world. Then they brought home Marley, a wiggly yellow furball of a puppy. Life would never be the same.
Marley grew into a barreling, ninety-seven-pound streamroller of a Labrador retriever. He crashed through screen doors, gouged through drywall, and stole women's undergarments. Obedience school did no good -- Marley was expelled.
But just as Marley joyfully refused any limits on his behavior, his love and loyalty were boundless, too. Marley remained a model of devotion, even when his family was at its wit's end. Unconditional love, they would learn, comes in many forms.
Marley & Me is John Grogan's funny, unforgettable tribute to this wonderful, wildly neurotic Lab and the meaning he brought to their lives.
- Print length320 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherWilliam Morrow Paperbacks
- Publication dateMarch 11, 2008
- Dimensions5.31 x 0.75 x 8 inches
- ISBN-109780060817091
- ISBN-13978-0060817091
- Lexile measure990L
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“A very funny valentine...Marley & Me tenderly follows its subject from sunrise to sunset...with hilarity and affection.” — Janet Maslin, New York Times
“[Marley & Me] rises above some others of its topic thanks to Grogan’s healthy dose of self-deprecating humor.” — MSNBC.com
“[Marley & Me] took my breath away. I laughed. I cried. . . . What a gift…immortalizing a dog who will always hold a very special place in the hearts of each family member.” — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Marley, meanwhile, is teaching America something about values―something that perhaps only a really bad dog with a really true heart can teach.” — Daily Mail (London)
“If you know someone who claims there’s not a book in the world that can make him cry, give him this one. It won’t even matter if he’s not a dog lover. He’ll cry anyway. Trust me.” — Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times
“A humorous and loving tribute…Throughout, the family is steadfastly devoted to this badly behaved yet totally lovable and loyal pup. …Readers…whose dogs would qualify for the “Bad Dog Club” will delight in this tribute.” — Library Journal
From the Back Cover
The heartwarming and unforgettable story of a family and the wondrously neurotic dog who taught them what really matters in life.
Now with photos and new material
About the Author
John Grogan is the author of the #1 international bestseller Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog, the bestselling middle-grade memoir Marley: A Dog Like No Other, and three #1 best-selling picture books: Bad Dog, Marley!, A Very Marley Christmas, and Marley Goes to School. John lives with his wife and their three children in the Pennsylvania countryside.
John Grogan ha sido un premiado reportero gráfico y columnista por más de veinticinco años. Vive en Pensilvania con su esposa Jenny y sus tres hijos.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Marley & Me
Life and Love with the World's Worst DogBy John GroganHarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright ©2008 John GroganAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780060817091
Chapter One
And Puppy Makes Three
We were young. We were in love. We were rollicking in those sublime early days of marriage when life seems about as good as life can get. We could not leave well enough alone. And so on a January evening in 1991, my wife of fifteen months and I ate a quick dinner together and headed off to answer a classified ad in the Palm Beach Post.
Why we were doing this, I wasn't quite sure. A few weeks earlier I had awoken just after dawn to find the bed beside me empty. I got up and found Jenny sitting in her bathrobe at the glass table on the screened porch of our little bungalow, bent over the newspaper with a pen in her hand.
There was nothing unusual about the scene. Not only was the Palm Beach Post our local paper, it was also the source of half of our household income. We were a two-newspaper-career couple. Jenny worked as a feature writer in the Post's "Accent" section; I was a news reporter at the competing paper in the area, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, based an hour south in Fort Lauderdale. We began every morning poring over the newspapers, seeing how our stories were played and how they stacked up to the competition. We circled, underlined, and clipped with abandon.
But on this morning, Jenny's nose was not in the news pages but in the classified section. When I stepped closer, I saw she was feverishly circling beneath the heading "Pets—Dogs."
"Uh," I said in that new-husband, still-treading-gently voice. "Is there something I should know?"
She did not answer.
"Jen-Jen?"
"It's the plant," she finally said, her voice carrying a slight edge of desperation.
"The plant?" I asked.
"That dumb plant," she said. "The one we killed."
The one we killed? I wasn't about to press the point, but for the record it was the plant that I bought and she killed. I had surprised her with it one night, a lovely large dieffenbachia with emerald-and-cream variegated leaves. "What's the occasion?" she'd asked. But there was none. I'd given it to her for no reason other than to say, "Damn, isn't married life great?"
She had adored both the gesture and the plant and thanked me by throwing her arms around my neck and kissing me on the lips. Then she promptly went on to kill my gift to her with an assassin's coldhearted efficiency. Not that she was trying to; if anything, she nurtured the poor thing to death. Jenny didn't exactly have a green thumb. Working on the assumption that all living things require water, but apparently forgetting that they also need air, she began flooding the dieffenbachia on a daily basis.
"Be careful not to overwater it," I had warned.
"Okay," she had replied, and then dumped on another gallon.
The sicker the plant got, the more she doused it, until finally it just kind of melted into an oozing heap. I looked at its limp skeleton in the pot by the window and thought, Man, someone who believes in omens could have a field day with this one.
Now here she was, somehow making the cosmic leap of logic from dead flora in a pot to living fauna in the pet classifieds. Kill a plant, buy a puppy. Well, of course it made perfect sense.
I looked more closely at the newspaper in front of her and saw that one ad in particular seemed to have caught her fancy. She had drawn three fat red stars beside it. It read: "Lab puppies, yellow. AKC purebred. All shots. Parents on premises."
"So," I said, "can you run this plant-pet thing by me one more time?"
"You know," she said, looking up. "I tried so hard and look what happened. I can't even keep a stupid houseplant alive. I mean, how hard is that? All you need to do is water the damn thing."
Then she got to the real issue: "If I can't even keep a plantalive, how am I ever going to keep a baby alive?" She looked like she might start crying.
The Baby Thing, as I called it, had become a constant in Jenny's life and was getting bigger by the day. When we had first met, at a small newspaper in western Michigan, she was just a few months out of college, and serious adulthood still seemed a far distant concept. For both of us, it was our first professional job out of school. We ate a lot of pizza, drank a lot of beer, and gave exactly zero thought to the possibility of someday being anything other than young, single, unfettered consumers of pizza and beer.
But years passed. We had barely begun dating when various job opportunities—and a one-year postgraduate program for me—pulled us in different directions across the eastern United States. At first we were one hour's drive apart. Then we were three hours apart. Then eight, then twenty-four. By the time we both landed together in South Florida and tied the knot, she was nearly thirty. Her friends were having babies. Her body was sending her strange messages. That once seemingly eternal window of procreative opportunity was slowly lowering.
I leaned over her from behind, wrapped my arms around her shoulders, and kissed the top of her head. "It's okay," I said. But I had to admit, she raised a good question. Neither of us had ever really nurtured a thing in our lives. Sure, we'd had pets growing up, but they didn't really count. We always knew our parents would keep them alive and well. We both knew we wanted to one day have children, but was either of us really up for the job? Children were so . . . so . . . scary. They were helpless and fragile and looked like they would break easily if dropped.
Continues...
Excerpted from Marley & Meby John Grogan Copyright ©2008 by John Grogan. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- ASIN : 0060817097
- Publisher : William Morrow Paperbacks; Reprint edition (March 11, 2008)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780060817091
- ISBN-13 : 978-0060817091
- Lexile measure : 990L
- Item Weight : 9.1 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.31 x 0.75 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #78,201 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #55 in Animal & Pet Care Essays
- #60 in Dog Breeds (Books)
- #2,545 in Memoirs (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
John Grogan is the author of the #1 international bestseller Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog, the bestselling middle-grade memoir Marley: A Dog Like No Other, and three #1 best-selling picture books: Bad Dog, Marley!, A Very Marley Christmas, and Marley Goes to School. John lives with his wife and their three children in the Pennsylvania countryside.
John Grogan ha sido un premiado reportero gráfico y columnista por más de veinticinco años. Vive en Pensilvania con su esposa Jenny y sus tres hijos.
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They were good buddies but Felix is mellow and afraid of his own shadow. Not so Oscar. He was very aggressive and stubborn, pretty much untrainable, for the 6 years, plus, that I had him. I tried patience, mild discipline, harsh discipline, short duration punishments, etc. Like John Grogan, I fell in love with both of my dogs in spite of big problems with Oscar's behavior.
I could not walk "the boys". Oscar wanted to fight any dog, regardless of size, any bike, car, child, old person or heaven help us if a rabbit, quail or squirrel appeared. Oscar nearly jerked my arm out of the socket many times as, when we walked, I kept him on a leash, trying to protect him, myself and his intended victims from a vicious, snapping, snarling, bared teeth attack.
He was bad in other ways, too, but this is supposed to be a review of John Grogan's book. All I can say is that it will be one book that will live with me for a very long time. About 2 to 4 days after I began reading this book, and enjoying every story, my dog, Oscar slipped a disk in his lower back, totally paralyzing both hind legs. Not an uncommon happening for long-bodied, short-leggged dachshunds, but very serious.
To be brief about it, the surgery, which is not guaranteed, was priced far out of my pensioners budget. And, I felt I would be putting Oscar thru a lot of suffering. At 8 years old, he may or may not have tolerated the surgery. Being such a pail of worms, keeping him quiet post surgery would have been a nightmare for him and for me.
The alternative of course was the same decision that John Grogan eventually faced with Marley - a rather abrupt need to make a hard decision.
Oscar was put to sleep and cremated February 10, 2006 so the sorrow is still very much with me (and with Felix who was Oscar's life-long buddy). Reading the stories of John, his wife, Jenny and Marley, and the family children somehow helped me thru these past couple of weeks. Tears have not entirely dried and Felix still pokes around the house with his nose, obviously wondering where his canine pal has gone.
If the reader is not a serious dog lover, this story won't mean as much to them as it means to me and as it will mean to any pet owner who has been there with his animal friend at the end of the day. A tear jerker, at the end of the story, but Marely is an treasure trove of hilarious adventures of exactly what can and will go wrong with a "bad" dog. Hilarious, that is, if it's someone else's dog.
The author, John Grogan must be a totally wonderful, caring and understanding man or he could never have put up with Marley's truly awful behavior, not to mention his usually patient wife who took most of it in her stride, too.
May the Grogan family enjoy their new golden lab, Gracie, as much as they did Marley and hopefully, with somewhat less struggle and strife.
Embarrassments,there will always be. Non-dog lovers won't understand much of this book, but who cares?
This lovingly, beautifully written book is a book to be read by anyone who has a dog to love.
Well written.
John Grogan was a reporter turned columnist in South Florida when he and his bride Jenny purchased an adorable little puppy and named him Marley, after Bob Marley. Marley proved, while growing up, to be an oversized, over-eating, unconventional and irascible dog. Breaking away from the leash and running off, humping poodles and other things, failing obedience classes and humiliating the instructor, crawling out of a moving car, eating Jenny's beautiful necklace John bought her when she first found out she was pregnant, jumping on people, chewing on anything in the house, howling at thunderstorms, tobogganing down a hill on top of John ... in other words, Marley was a holy terror.
John began to write about Marley in his newspaper columns, and soon all of South Florida knew and loved Marley and his antics. From puppy to adult to old age and sadly, his death, Marley was definitely a part of the Grogan family. John Grogan is a very talented writer (well, he does it for a living) and tells Marley's tale in this book with talent, humor, tragedy, and finesse. The Grogan family was definitely blessed to have such a unique dog. That John Grogan took his pen and turned his memoirs of life with Marley into a book is a blessing, allowing all readers to enjoy the antics of the world's worst dog. This is a not-to-be-missed book; make sure you pick it up, and the movie as well. Ten Stars! Enjoy!
Top reviews from other countries
Esse livro é maravilhoso!!!! Não tenho nem palavras.