Animal Blessings: Prayers and Poems Celebrating Our Pets

Sometimes it's easy to find the right gift for that difficult aunt: if she's devoted to her cat or dog, ship her a copy of Animal Blessings. The latest in a line of inspirational books from dog lover June Cotner (she also wrote and edited Graces, Bedside Prayers, and Get Well Wishes), this one, like the others, is slim, compact, and filled with entries that melt into the mind as easily as M&M's in the mouth. The writers range from the great (Whitman and Keats, Eckhart and Dostoyevsky) to children and Anonymous. So too do the entries vary widely. Rarely extending beyond half a page, they move from the humorous ("Say something idiotic and nobody but a dog politely wags his tail") to the sublime (Eckhart's "If I spent enough time with the tiniest creature ... I would never have to prepare a sermon. So full of God is every creature") to the silly ("scratch a dog and you'll find a permanent job"). Given that there are more than 100 million cat and dog owners in the United States alone, this book should fill a niche in many of their lives. And where else can you find Doris Day next to Elizabeth Barrett Browning? --Doug Thorpe