The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People
by Rick Bragg
From the publisher's website:
Speck is not a good boy. He is a terrible
boy, a defiant, self-destructive, often malodorous boy, a grave robber
and screen door moocher who spends his days playing chicken with the Fed
Ex man, picking fights with thousand-pound livestock, and rolling in
donkey manure, and his nights howling at the moon. He has been that way
since the moment he appeared on the ridgeline behind Rick Bragg’s house,
a starved and half-dead creature, seventy-six pounds of wet hair and
poor decisions.
Speck arrived in Rick’s life at a moment of
looming uncertainty. A cancer diagnosis, chemo, kidney failure, and
recurring pneumonia had left Rick lethargic and melancholy. Speck
helped, and he is helping, still, when he is not peeing on the rose of
Sharon. Written with Bragg’s inimitable blend of tenderness and sorrow,
humor and grit, The Speckled Beauty captures the extraordinary, sustaining devotion between two damaged creatures who need each other to heal.
