Outside of a Dog

About this book

Outside of a dog a book is mans best friend. Inside of a dog its too dark to read. Groucho Marx Outside of a Dog is the captivating account of twenty-five books drawn from the fields of literature psychology and philosophy and a memoir of a reading self. Tracing the formative role books have played in his life Rick Gekoski trains the same ironic and analytic eye on these books and their authors as he does on himself. The result is unique: a sustained witty book dedicated to the proposition that we are what we read. Outside of A Dog might be described as an intellectual bibliomemoir except that the author regards the noun intellectual as a term of abuse. Gekoskis twenty-five include: Dr. Seuss Horton Hatches the Egg; Magnus Hirschfeld Sexual Anomalies and Perversions; Allen Ginsberg Howl; J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye; T.S. Eliot The Waste Land; Descartes Meditations; David Hume An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding; W.B. Yeats The Collected Poems; F.R. Leavis The Common Pursuit; Matthew Arnold Culture and Anarchy; Tom Wolfe The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations; R.D. Laing The Divided Self; Germaine Greer The Female Eunuch; D.H. Lawrence Women in Love; A.S. Neill Summerhill; Roald Dahl Matilda; Alice Miller Pictures of a Childhood; A.J. Ayer Language Truth and Logic; Sigmund Freud The Interpretation of Dreams; Carl Hiaasen Double Whammy; Peter Wright Spycatcher; and Rick Gekoski Staying Up.