"People who love dogs often talk about a 'lifetime' dog. I'd heard the phrase a dozen times before I came to recognize its significance. Lifetime dogs are dogs we love in especially powerful, sometimes inexplicable ways." Author Katz tells the story of his lifetime dog, Orson: a beautiful border collie--intense, smart, crazy, and unforgettable. From the moment Katz and Orson meet, their relationship is deep, stormy, and loving. Two years old, Katz's...

Explores the bond between dogs and their owners, looking at twelve dog-human relationships in Montclair, New Jersey that illuminate the tendency for people to use dogs to fill the emotional needs caused by divorce, illness, or other problems.

"After following her mother to the US at a young age to pursue economic opportunities, one woman must come to terms with the ways in which systematic racism and resultant trauma keep the American Dream inaccessible to Black people. In the early '90s, young Tiffanie Drayton and her siblings left Trinidad and Tobago to join their mother in New Jersey, where she'd been making her way as a domestic worker, eager to give her children a shot at the American...

Journalist Heather Green was finally putting down roots: in shiny, buzzing Manhattan. She loved her work and threw herself into sixty-hour weeks--once walking into a subway pole, getting a concussion, and still going to the office. Her new boyfriend Matt lived across the river in a New Jersey town that had none of the glamour of New York. She liked Matt--a lot--yet she wasn't sure what to make of weekends in gritty, dilapidated Union City. But things...