Walking With Zeke

For weeks now, I've been carrying Walking With Zeke, by Chris Clarke, around with me. I've squeezed this book into my purse and taken it across the country by plane, its pages rifled through by security at LAX. It has endured my tears, my fingers pinching and dog-earing its pages in wonder, my constant, hungry scribbling in the margins. It has glared up at me from a desk in a hotel, daring me to finish it when I didn't think I could endure its emotional punch. You should see this thing. When I bought it, it was crisp and white and beautiful. Now it looks like it has been tread upon by a monster truck. Twice. Even now that I have read and digested this book, I find that I'm not quite finished with it. I find that it has digested a little of me in the process, scraped me down. It has left me without the words to tell you why you should read it, simply that you should, and must. Please understand: this is not a book review. In a review, one is expected to be unbiased. To disclose a work's shortcomings along with its highlights. So, okay. If you hate humans or relationships or animals or plant life, you should not read this book. If you hate feeling something in such a way that you can't forget it, read another book instead. There, that fulfills that requirement. Walking With Zeke is a story about a man who loved a dog, and the dog who loved him back. It is about love, but, as Clarke warns us, it is not hagiography. It is not sentimental. This is not the bland love of a movie dog that has eaten Jennifer Aniston's necklace. If that's what you're looking for, shop someplace else. This is the fierce and abiding love of a dog that has used a rubber duck as a digestive aid, and the kind of man who could not bear to throw away the duck. It's quit your job to be there, love. It's love at the end of life, love. Face against the floor, love. "The problem with dogs," Clarke writes, "is that they live long enough that one day you can no longer remember your life without them." You know from a line so powerful and true exactly what kind of writer you're dealing with. Ultimately, Walking With Zeke is more about Chris Clarke than it is about his dog, Zeke. A man who can tell you everything about miner's lettuce and cholla, who can walk you through the lifespan of a tree, Clarke comes off as the wise and fascinating friend everyone wishes they had. A guy who "listens to ravens and raves at the listless," who prays to the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. He's a less prickly Ed Abbey, a tougher Rick Bass, a Barry Lopez with humor. The kind of writer who observes, without a hint of pretension, that "a long life is a landscape of holes where things once grew." But at the heart of Clarke is Zeke. Zeke is an actual character in this story. Adventurous and occasionally misunderstood (no, he's not part wolf), he's the canine comic relief and the tragic figure combined, stubborn and smart and decent. "If I leak tears of grief, Zeke

I have a shepherd-mix dog by the name of Sheba who's in her twelfth year, and her back legs are just starting to show the signs of letting her down, although in personality she remains about two. So when I saw this book, I knew had to buy it, and downloaded the Kindle version. Chris Clarke's book about his walks with his old dog Zeke is a sensitive work that anyone who has an older dog must read, and that any dog lover will appreciate. Yes, it has moments that will definitely move you to tears -- but others will put smiles in your heart. And, if your relationship with your dog is like mine with Sheba, his descriptions of his association with Zeke will ring so true to you that it will feel, at times, as though he has been able to use telepathy to read your own human/canine relationship. Flashbacks to times with Zeke in his younger days, and when Clarke and his wife found Zeke as a rescue pup, bring lightness to the story of the dog's final few years. The first thing I did yesterday, after finishing the book (and with a still-wet face), was take Sheba -- also a rescue dog -- out for a good walk. It's a book that will remind you how much you will miss your four-legged friend, and not to take him or her for granted during the remaining years.... Along the way, Clarke, who is an ecology writer/columnist, provides wonderful word images of the surroundings that he and Zeke walked, and the creatures they met.

I have never before spent more than $1.99 on an e-book that wasn't on a best seller list. However, Walking with Zeke was recommended on the Kindle forum, there were good reader reviews, I hadn't read a true dog story in a long time, and, in the picture of Zeke on the cover, Zeke looked like a personality plus dog. I couldn't resist. And, I am so glad. I agree with R. Hatch that words cannot describe this book. The writing is outstanding. It is poetry. Halfway through the book, I am in love with California nature and Zeke with his unbounded pure joy. But, I am crying because the end has been foreshadowed. Be sure to have big box of Kleenex handy.

A neighbor saw me walking my dog one day and said, "You walking with your dog reminds me of the book Walking with Zeke by Chris Clarke... C-L-A-R-K-E. It's one of my favorite books. It's...(brief pause)...wow...(pauses, voice cracking with emotion) really something." I knew then that I absolutely had to read this book and ordered it right away. This book is a must read for anyone that loves nature and especially for those who have ever had a dog as a best friend. The descriptions of nature, of Zeke, and the author's sincere love for his best friend are poetry - spectacularly vivid. This book is one of the most profoundly moving books I have ever read. With each turn of the page, Zeke captivated my heart more and more. At the end of the book my heart ached deeply , mourning the loss of Zeke.

(This review first appeared on [...].) Chris Clarke calls "Walking with Zeke" an edited compilation of "several years of writing about my best friend's life and death." It's pretty safe to say that "Walking with Zeke" is the best self-published book of the year, and the best "book that grew from a blog" of all time. Lifted straight from the author's acclaimed Creek Running North web log (blog seems too coarse a word for the fine writing he's done here) with only a little reworking, it's surprising how well the story coheres, told in the original journal entry format. This is a great animal book, but also much more than an animal book. It's filled with the author's love for his companion, deft characterizations of Zeke, and moving accounts of the author's near-heroic efforts to care for him until the end. As an old writing instructor once said, "If you're not risking sentimentality, you're not even in the ballpark." Treading on inherently sentimental ground, Clarke rises above sentimentality to deliver honest and often gripping emotion. But beyond the central core of Zeke's story, this is also a book filled with careful observations of nature in the author's Bay Area community of Pinole, in the Sierra, in the Mojave, and elsewhere. There are also odd moments of humor, fascinating meditations on the convergent evolution of humans and dogs, and thoughts on the intersection of wild and tamed nature. Walking with Zeke achieves what all good nature writing should: it reminds us simply to pay attention.