Colin Dayan is Robert Penn Warren Professor of the Humanities and professor of law at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons, The Story of Cruel and Unusual, and Haiti, History, and the Gods. She has also written for the New York Times, London Review of Books, and Boston Review.
In three lively and beautifully written movements, Colin Dayan offers a memorable tour de force that threads together memoir and an analysis of the deprivations of life, human and nonhuman and human with nonhuman, that so pervasively characterize our neoliberal world-historical moment. Intelligent and moving, With Dogs at the Edge of Life is an extraordinary book, a courageous and compelling intermingling of arresting cultural critique and autobiographical reflections of a life lived in the company of canines. -- David L. Clark, McMaster University Colin Dayan has again produced a probing and brilliant examination of a part of that long history history of extermination masked by the veneer of enlightenment. Always writing with justice in mind, Dayan's consideration of our relationship with dogs yields a complex meditation on humanity and life's uncertain possibilities. Beautiful, more than just another dog story, as only Dayan could write it. -- Avery F. Gordon, University of California, Santa Barbara