Come Back, Como: How to Win the Heart of a Reluctant Dog - Training Tips & Bonding Techniques for Anxious Pets

As a UC Berkeley instructor, I encouraged students not to superimpose their point of view on an author but instead, as a good detective would, find out what an author intends. To help, in this instance, click on Amazon's hard cover version of the book to the video trailer and listen to Winn. From what he says and does in the book, Come Back Como was never envisioned as a fluffy warm fuzzy, nor was it aimed at a dog-owner audience only, certainly not dog experts. That's why it begins in a broader context, not in a full description of Como. The book's structure softly indicates the author's larger purpose.Vivid descriptions from the belly-laugh producing toilet episode to the wrenching accident moments amply create the specific world of the Winn family as well as all that is known about Gandalf before they adopt him. This deliberate simplicity discloses the author's fluid writing skill. For example, the dog's name changes from Gandalf to Como to "Z." Winn provides a context for each change that signals the significance of those crucial internal shifts for everyone intimately involved. For some, those shifts may be uncomfortable. In a perfect world, it would be wonderful if every dog adopted from a shelter found itself in the company of experienced "dog people." But Winn knows all too well that ours has never been a perfect world, and if shelter animals - as well of those of us who have been damaged to some extent by our origins, as all of us, in some form or other have been -- had to wait for people with such skills, their fates would be oh-so-different from Como's.Delineating the particular dog almost invisibly huddled in a corner of his shelter cage, the particular family who chooses him in that state, the details of the families that have produced Mr. Winn and his wife allows the reader to begin to sense the universal themes that embrace us all -- types of "shelter dogs," if you will.Winn creates the unfolding of a journey in which people and dog become intertwined, a journey that mimics for every reader how we discover meaning and especially how we share it. Such an unfolding is common to and, indeed, expected in fiction. But taking an actual story and sifting through its elements to determine how to capture what the best of fiction always does is not so easy. Thus, looking back at what "the" means in the preceding paragraph.One superb story aspect is the amount and type of change required of each family member - including Como, the important catalyst for the family members' discovering salient features of who they really are, what they want, how they achieve those wants, and how that achievement allows them to grow.The book grounds itself in a story about a particular family and expands to the human family to which we all belong. Families from which each of us comes, families that we create or join. And families in which a pet (unlike most other nations in the world) can become as important as Como (in this instance) chooses. In microcosm, what happens to Como and to his family reveals the ever-evolving way in which every sentient creature travels through the world, living experience, making sense of it, holding on to what is good and productive and uplifting and attempting to recreate it.Yet the book is never preachy nor does it set itself up as a life guide by emphasizing the mistakes we all are subject to and the hopeful fact that we can learn from them. It is, as the best of books, an unsentimental example of an event with which all of us can identify and within which all of us can see ourselves - sometimes with pants about our ankles, other times with throbbing hearts rushing to save a life. It is a true story both in its commonality and in its universality -- simultaneously simply and sumptuously -- filled with the breadth that life offers each of us: tears and laughter, heartache and hope, dreams and the daily facts of what we find in our path and how we deliberately choose to see all of it.