The Word of Dog

What Our Canine Companions Can Teach Us About Living a Good Life

By: Mark Rowlands

Narrated by: Todd McLaren

A heartwarming philosophical meditation on how to live a fulfilling life—inspired by the inherent happiness of dogs.

If you have spent any part of your life with a dog, you may have found certain questions popping, unbidden, into your mind: Is my dog living a fulfilled life? Is my dog a good dog? Does my dog love me? Addressing these questions compels you to confront not just your dog's life but yours as well—to think about what fulfillment, and meaning, in life really is.

In The Word of Dog, philosopher Mark Rowlands explores these questions and suggests that in dogs we can see hints—faint, shrouded, but discernible—of what a better way of living might look like. Perhaps none of us can be happy in the way a dog can, but The Word of Dog shows us we could do a lot better than we're doing simply by listening to the unspoken wisdom our dogs reveal to us every day of their happy, uncomplicated lives.

©2024 Mark Rowlands (P)2025 Highbridge Audio

The endless repetition of simple ideas.

Gave up halfway through. I tried to persevere thinking at first the repetition was a stylistic choice but it looked more and more like lazy editing and thin concepts.

Tedious and boring

A contrived review of philosophy concepts using the author's dog to explain how these work.

Lots of stuff I don’t need to know

Lots of stuff I don’t need to know and it couldn’t be more boring. Don’t know what else to say. I did manage to get through the first chapter.

Love your dog and your life will have meaning

Loved everything. Much of it I had already intuited just by sharing my life with many dog companions, but it was meaningful to see it proved by science and /or reasoning.

Everything

The narrator did more than justice to this book and he brought me to tears in the end