Albert Payson TerhuneRecensioni

Animals

This is a well written book.

But it’s not an easy book or a comforting book.

This book is under review. It contains some strong descriptions of violence as well as dialogue that was typical of its time (1919).

A fairly good story with some unexpected turns and a few plot developments that I saw coming. Worth a read, especially if you like the author's books.

I wish more of the dog's story was included, he's only in a few of the scenes. The original title is The Luck of the Laird, which actually makes more sense considering the lack of collie involvement.

This is the book that made me trans. Also, as a child, I read so many dog books that real live dogs have been a disappointment to me ever since.

Wolf. Sired by purebred Collies, his mother and father were show dogs of great repute. Wolf. HIs nature and intelligence was pure but his appearance was not. He didn't have the physical appearance of a Collie but was kept on due to his nature.
This book is basically seven short stories, each telling a tale in this remarkable little dog's life. He was uncanny. His adventures were joyous and good. Each story ends with a smile. Even the last. The last is is last adventure. I smiled with tears in my eyes.

What a wild bunch of adventures of a very bad dog! Nice twist at the end. Good old fashioned dog story about a mutt for a change. Terhune is known for his gallant collie stories. This one was quite different. Fun though!

I didn't like this as much as I had hoped. This book was created by collecting a bunch of short stories and as a result has a tendency toward repetition of basic phrases which got a bit tedious. Many of Terhunes attitudes are very dated and problematic. Lad is certainly a remarkable dog. I can see why kids were thrilled with it when it first came out. It has a lot of action and Lad is quite heroic (despite his "absurdly tiny paws"). I didn't much care for the amount of violence. I enjoyed reading a biography of Terhune after this. Unusual guy, not terribly admirable, but interesting. My book group was not too thrilled. I love Sam Savitt's illustration.

God, this is awful. I love dogs. I love dog books. Silver Chief, Dog of the North and Big Red were among my favorite books growing up. I didn't even much mind reading James Oliver Curwood's Swift Lightening a year or so ago, although it was a pretty silly book. But this piece of crap is beyond the pale. To begin with, it's hideously racist, both in describing the behavior of people and that of dogs. The protagonist dog, Lad, is allegedly a collie, but his behavior isn't evenly remotely collie-like according to my understanding of collies. And yes, you can infer undying love and loyalty in some aspects of dog behavior, but please do not endow dogs with the powers of complex moral reasoning, a trait bestowed upon them, according to Terhune, by dint of their being "thoroughbred". WTF?

Then too, the stories are hideously melodramatic and extremely morally judgmental. Great melodrama might have sold a century ago, but melodrama has always been a cheep way to cheat people out of authentic experience. As for moral judgments, I don't generally mind them, so long as they're apt. Dogs, however, are not beings capable of such, and whether or not one is a true dog person or not is not a matter of moralism. After forcing myself to read five of the stories, trying hard not to vomit each time, I took a rest. Then, after a month I tried a sixth story, and I couldn't get past a couple of paragraphs. God is this awful dreck!

Read for LIBR 465. Historic Book Review Assignment.

I read this long ago when my mother gave me her Terhune books. As a child I focused on the story of Bruce: how the dog grew up and then became a war dog. Written between World War I and World War II, there was only one war, The Great War.

As an adult, I got the added level of the story about the war, with trench warfare and poison gas a reality. Written so soon after the end of the war, the reader gets a good view of how many Americans viewed the war and the animosity toward the "evil Huns." (All Quiet on the Western Front provides a good look at the other side of the story.) For that reason, I would be more cautious about simply handing the book over to a young person. History was a casual part of my family's dinner conversation, so I instinctively knew that the feelings shouldn't be transferred to present day.

Still, I found myself liking the book and rooting for Bruce to make it, against all odds. If you like dogs and understand the historical setting, you might like it as well.½

Ewwww. Terhune's definition of a super-woman, in its entirety, is a woman who is wildly attractive to men. He does a prologue in which he explains that that's the only trait they have in common, they vary in every other respect - but there's an invisible set of expectations that Terhune has and doesn't explicate. He thinks that the ideal super-woman is also stupid, entirely selfish, and very beautiful - every time (frequently) one of his examples breaks that model he is volubly surprised. She was charitable! She helped another woman! She showed any financial, or political, acumen - he spends paragraphs on how unlikely these traits are in the women he's applied this label to. Ugh. Oh, and long discussions of any woman who wasn't beautiful (or conventionally beautiful) - how they could possibly have been attractive. I was learning interesting things about interesting (at least some of them) women (from Helen of Troy to Ninion de l'Enclos to George Sands), but it was in spite of Terhune's opinionated writing, not because of it. And the cherry on top - he wrote with glee about the downfall of his super-women, and was visibly disappointed in the ones who actually managed to have a happy life at the end. I love Terhune's dog books, but I'm not reading anything else he wrote from now on. UGH.

Cute, very Terhune series of stories. It starts with a misshapen pup thrown out into the wild, who manages to come back a magnificent dog. Then it's lots of stories about how he truly loves his master, and said master winning in life because of the dog. Fun fluff. There are a few too many coincidences - times when the two of them are separated (again). I like the camping trip one best - Bobby is just being a (smart) dog, not a miracle-worker. Enjoyable, and probably worth rereading (again) in a few years. I have read it before (a good many years ago), but I didn't remember anything except the barest sketch of the first story.½

This is a mystery, an adventure story, a pirate's tale and a romance Written in 1922 the flavor is very different from today's depictions of mysteries and as a man of his time, Terhune is now often criticized by some for his starkly racist depictions of the minorities. Look past these differences and you find a travelogue of Florida, a depiction of manners of the early 21st century, a search for adventure and a desire to make a difference. Entertaining though written in a different time period and style. Intriguing as the motives behind the characters actions are hidden until the denouement.

These books are some of my all-time favorites.

As much as I loved most of the book, I never have gotten past the scene where a visitor's kid nearly burns the family cat alive, Lad tries to intervene, and the kid's father tries to beat the dog with a chair--and during this, the author's great concern is that he remember his duty as a host and remain gracious to his guests. And after that, continues to socialize with them!

I realize it was a different time with different social standards, but this scene completely infuriates me! If a visitor tortured my pets, being "gracious" would be the last thing on my mind--avoiding a homicide charge would be a much greater priority! The fact that this animal-abusing jackass continues to show up in the rest of the book just turned my stomach. I think the intent was to make it better by having Lad consistently show him up, but it backfired for me.

Honestly, I'd rate this a lot more highly otherwise. Lad's a great dog and it's generally a lovely book. But I cut the rating severely because when asked for my first impressions of it, I don't think of "that cute book about the collie", but "that book with the scene that put my blood pressure in the atmosphere".½

A mix of good, fair, and excellent stories by the owner and author of "Lad".½

A satisfying collection of stories featuring Lad of Sunnybank.½

This will be revisited at some point, but it came up as a GoodReads recommendation, and I wanted to share my memory of this book.

I read my pop's old paperback copy of this, and encountered my first (traumatizing) experience with old paperback book-binding glue. It was tragic. I was 9, and not at fault, but since my father loved this book, I got chewed out thoroughly for the pages that were falling out like leaves from an autumn tree, regardless of how lovingly and reverently I treated this copy.

Sadness aside, I have mixed memories of this book, some sad (as Lad drags himself across the snow unerringly), some happy (he was a wonderful family dog), and some adorable (him mouthing the lady's foot).

This is a book for dog lovers, written by a dog lover. Flat out. And I loved it. Even the sad bits (which I generally hate, but always stand out so strongly for me in retrospect).

I had sung the praises of Rin Tin Tin to my pop, and read many Jim Kjelgaard (why does my spell check want to change this name, when I memorized the spelling to better peruse his works in our various library card catalogues?) doggie stories which I enjoyed, wanting each of the breeds written on, and at this point added English Collie to this list. My sweet father who knew that I was so like him, let me borrow his ancient paperback copy that he had enjoyed as a boy himself.

We knew each other as if I were cut from the same cloth he had been. And I appreciated that about him. So when I read this story, I knew that I would enjoy it just as he had. And I did. Until I returned the book, and the pages were beginning to slip free. I felt bad. He felt bad. It was a bad experience.

But even with that, I recall this book in the light of the love of a good dog.

Years later, when I wound up with a rescued Collie whom I named 'Prince' (his real name, turned out when his delinquent owner showed up, was Cheeseballs) it was this story that came to mind as I brushed him for what was perhaps the first time in his life, loosening mats and burrs and scabs from old scars, telling myself stories of Lad and where all that came from as he trembled in my lap, unwilling to get off me. He was a culmination of my hopes and dreams and memories of this book, and too short with me.

But still, I have always dreamed of having a dog as loyal as this. This book is the ideal, the standard, the pinnacle all good dogs can be measured against. Lad is not just a dog, but a saint in canine form.

A story to be savoured, for sure. It has stood the test of time.

Pretty dumb story. Very much in Terhune's style (there's even a collie, though it doesn't play any major part in the story). It's all very obvious - OK, the very first part, while Brice (Our Hero) is apparently just a down-at-heel tramp, leaves the reader wondering what's up. But he quickly reveals himself (to the reader, not the other characters) as more than that - and of course the girl that catches his eye and heart is utterly pure despite being in the middle of a nasty scam (though he's not sure of that for some time - it's more obvious to the reader than to him). And of course the collie instantly accepts him as his master...and the Persian cat has a peculiar characteristic which Brice (and Terhune) claims is characteristic of the breed, and which is very useful throughout the book (rather more useful than the collie, actually). There's no twist here - everything works out just the way you expect it to as soon as the bare skeleton of the plot is revealed. Though Brice's outburst in the boat was mildly amusing - and he got what he wanted anyway, after she gave up being mad at him. Heavy racism - Japanese is "monkey-jibber", his "conch" (Keys native) ally is regularly referred to as "boy" (Good job, boy!), and so on. Accurate and unnoticeable for the time, unpleasant for modern readers. I'm not sorry I read it, but I have no intention of reading it again (unlike Terhune's dog stories, which I love). The copy I read (from Project Gutenberg) was obviously scanned in, and not edited all that well - a lot of scannos, and more formatting errors (mostly paragraph breaks added, a few missing, and the like). Never quite bad enough to distract me from the story, though.

A very good and worthy collection of stories by the master and author of Lad:A Dog. Some of the tales will make you smile, a couple will pull hard at your heart, tug at your emotions, but none will bore you.

This is the story of a lonely man who comes across an injured collie, and how caring for it changes the man, for the better.

I enjoyed this book almost as much as some of the author's other stories. Recommended.

Albert Payson Terhune (1872–1942) had several careers, eventually settling into journalism and writing. He and his wife also bred collies at their Sunnybank Kennels in New Jersey, and Terhune based most of his writing in the 1920s and 30s on dogs. His first published works were short stories in magazines about his collie Lad, and he collected a dozen stories into the novel "Lad: A Dog." That 1919 work has been reprinted over 80 times and was made into a feature film in 1962.

Although not known for writing mysteries, he did pen the novel "Black Caesar's Clan: A Florida Mystery Story," published in 1922. The title comes from the 18th century African pirate Black Caesar, who raided ships around the Florida Keys and served as a chief lieutenant for Captain Blackbeard. One of the only surviving crew from Lieutenant Robert Maynard's attack on Blackbeard in 1718, Caesar established a base on Elliot Key.

Terhune's novel is set in and around what is now known as Caesar's Creek, where the descendants of Caesar and his crew chase off treasure hunters looking for Caesar's lost fortune. It was part of a wave of treasure-hunting fiction around the Great Depression, when desperate times called for desperate measures. The plot starts off with a fight between Gavin Brice and a beachcomber over a homeless collie (yes, this wouldn't be a Terhune novel without a collie).

Gavin Brice at first appears to be a down-on-his-luck transplant to Florida looking for work. However, he has a hidden agenda for "accidentally" getting himself attached to the shady Rodney Hade and his employee Milo Standish (defending him from an attack with his 'jui-jutsu' skills), in their hideaway plantation. Brice is close to succeeding in his quest until the innocent but beguiling Claire, Milo's younger sister, makes him question the secrets he's been hiding.

Terhune infuses his tale with quite a bit of humor, including this statement by Brice to a young woman who pulled a gun on him in a case of mistaken identity:

"Oh, please don't feel sorry for that!" he begged. "It wasn't really as deadly as you made it seem. That is an old style revolver, you see, vintage of 1880 or thereabouts, I should say. Not a self-cocker. And, you'll notice it isn't cocked. So, even if you had stuck to your lethal threat and had pulled the trigger ever so hard, I'd still be more or less alive. You'll excuse me for mentioning it," he ended in apology, noting her crestfallen air. "Any novice in the art of slaying might have done the same thing. Shooting people is an accomplishment that improves with practice."

Terhune apparently was conflicted about the mystery genre, as indicated in his Foreword where he talks about "mystery and romance and thrills to be found lurking among the keys and back of the mangrove-swamps and along the mystic reaches of sunset shoreline," but then adds, "Understand, please, that this book is rank melodrama. It has scant literary quality. It is not planned to edify. Its only mission is to entertain you and—if you belong to the action-loving majority—to give you an occasional thrill."

Terhune is sometimes criticized by contemporary critics for his racist depictions of minorities and "half-breeds." In Black Caesar, Brice even refers to his former Japanese martial arts instructor as "monkey faced." But Terhune was a product of his time, and if you can overlook the occasional cringe-inducing reference, you'll find this a quick, light read.

Terhune's Sunnybank books were favorites of mine from childhood and I'm having a good time revisiting them now. Written is 1921, a couple of the stories were a bit on the violent side but for the most part they were all very enjoyable, especially the title story. Recommended for anyone who likes old fashioned dog stories.

I contemplated for about 15 seconds if this book deserved four stars. Yep, that long!

"Gray Dawn" is one of the better, nay, best of the Sunnybank collie stories, including the original "Lad: A Dog". I realized at one point that I was reading quickly, too quickly, in my eagerness to find out how each chapter would end. That, to me, is an indication of a book's quality and worth: for the time it took me to read "Gray Dawn", I was IN the story, with the collies and the Terhunes. I am sorry that the last page finally appeared, and I had to leave Sunnybank.

A worthy read for not just dog lovers, but for any lover of a good story. Highly recommended.

(I just upped this book and "Lad: A Dog" an extra 1/2 star, well deserved!)½

87. Lad: A Dog by Albert Payson Terhune (read c. 1941) I remember liking this book a lot, but I have always liked dog and animal books, though I have not read too many.