I recently finished reading Dog Man - An Uncommon Life on a Faraway Mountain by Martha Sherrill. Dog Man gives an interesting glimpse into the life of a family, post WWII in Japan’s snow country. Morie (pronounced Mor ee ay) Sawataishi, a soulful non-conformist, is credited with saving the Akita dog from extinction and helping to shape it into the breed it is today. Dog Man is a fascinating story of health, perseverance, dedication, ethics, sacrifices, heartbreak, and triumph. It is a story of a man, his equally strong wife, and the dogs that embody the spirit that he wishes he could become.

First paragraph in the Introduction reads: "There are mountain villages and green valleys throughout Japan, and very few people live in them. The cities teem and buzz with life – each year with increasing speed and sophistication, more crowds and smaller cell phones and a dizzying parade of manmade pleasures. But far away, the snow country world moves quietly, almost forgotten, except as a dream. This is the story of that dream. It’s about one man’s devotion to a place and way of being, however preposterous it may seem to others, and how he gently, and not so gently, steers his life there.

Click here to read The New York Times Review of this book.