By Magdalena Hernandez

Ken Foster, GB'89, has had friends snarl at him, bite him, and defecate in his car. He's not running with psychotics or sociopaths. The pals in question are dogs. And Foster is so forgiving of their outre behavior he could be canonized.

Or, rather, "caninized." In fact, Foster would no doubt view being made an honorary dog the highest mark of distinction. Not that he's alone. Man's best friend commonly commands a passionate response.

The Dogs Who Found Me is a life story with a twist. It's more meditation on the dogs the author has known than standard memoir. However, via the prism of Foster's animal relationships, we learn much about him. Pets are "like tattoos," he explains, leaving "their own indelible marks."

Foster isn't a standard-issue dog lover. He likes to rescue pups in need, locating homes for them or at least getting them out of harm's way. He finds dogs "tied under park benches. Stuck in drainage grates. Running door to door in the neighborhood with half an eye out," he writes. On vacations, he stops to scoop up lost dogs from roadsides.

Three pooches become a permanent part of his life. Brando is a pit-bull mix Foster adopts from a pet store run by the Brooklyn Animal Resource Coalition, a no-kill animal shelter.

His next adoptee, a rottweiler mix named Zephyr, seems to choose him, not the other way around. A foster dog from a local Humane Society, Zephyr makes a beeline for the author at a Florida book signing.

Sula, another pit bull, shows up on a neighbor's porch in such rough condition Foster believes she's been used in dogfights. He adopts her after seeing her through grueling rounds of surgery on her injured eye and worming.

Foster is self-aware enough to plumb his motives for saving dogs. "One of the reasons we rescue things," he writes, "is to feel a sense of control that we may not really have in our own lives. If we can save something, maybe then we can do anything. Or maybe saving that one thing really is all we can do, but we will have done it, absolutely."

He is particularly partial to pit bulls, an oft-maligned breed. They're not the ticking time bombs many city dwellers imagine, he reports, but extremely affectionate animals, vicious only in the hands of abusive owners.

For his part, Foster feels so much affection for his dogs that it occasionally borders on the romantic. He owns up to the anthropomorphism, describing dog-dog and human-dog crushes and jealousies in language that might have been lifted from a romance novel. After recovering Sula, who liked to run off for midnight rambles around the neighborhood, he writes, "I would ask her over and over on the way home: Why are you trying to break my heart?"

But his is an understandable fondness. Foster's dogs shepherd him through several traumatic episodes, including living through September 11, 2001, as a resident of Manhattan. The day spurs him into a kind of heroism. "It was sometime after that that I began finding dogs and wanting to rescue them," he writes. "But each time I do, I find myself having that same puzzling epiphany, wondering if I'm doing it for them or whether, in rescuing them, I'm actually doing something for myself."

A more personal misfortune strikes while Foster is living in New Orleans. He's constantly exhausted, capable of sleeping forty-eight hours straight, dizzy, and short of breath. He doesn't seek medical help until his dogs start to rouse him from denial. Zephyr begins sitting on his chest in the mornings. Sula leaps at him, as if trying to indicate something amiss.

He finally consults doctors who diagnose cardiac failure severe enough to require a pacemaker. By the time Foster tells this story, we know enough about him to find the news ironic. After all, a person who's rescued so many animals could have very little wrong with his heart.

Yet Foster's honest about how saving dogs provides both an altruistic outlet and the illusion of control. Following the deaths of two friends, he writes, "I was grateful for the problem of Biloxi, yet another distraction, a crisis to which I controlled the conclusion. I couldn't save [friends] Amanda or Lucy, but I could make sure Biloxi found a home."

In the book's last chapter, Foster recounts his thinking as he evacuated New Orleans steps ahead of Hurricane Katrina. He's not worried about his own safety—he leaves because he realizes that, in a worst-case scenario, "I could wade to higher ground, but I'd never be able to get my dogs out." In hindsight, he realizes his concern for his dogs' well-being may have saved his life.

The Dogs Who Found Me occasionally reads like a handbook for would-be dog rescuers. An appendix includes a checklist entitled "What to Do When You Find a Dog" and a description of various rescue organizations. The chapter "How to Read a Dog" outlines important cues to canine behavior. "How to Let Go" talks temporary guardians through the inevitable separation.

Elsewhere, the author explains what heartworm is and how to cure it. How to grab a dog without getting bitten. What practical jokers pit bulls are (who knew?).

Foster, who has also written a short-story collection, The Kind I'm Likely to Get, and edited an anthology called Dog Culture: Writers on the Character of Canines, always manages to avoid sounding like a know-it-all or a scold. He's a low-key teacher, so accustomed to being around dogs that it's easy to view him as their translator or spokesperson.

The book's conversational, straightforward prose is one of its strengths. And Foster's powers of observation and eye for meaningful detail elevate what he has to say above the level of the average memoir.

You come to realize that, for Foster, dogs represent what he believes matters most in life: connection. As he notes, "The value of a dog's companionship has increased in the age of the Internet. Dogs continue to bring us into a real space, even as our other connections fade into the world of forwarded messages masquerading as communication."

In the end, Foster's book is as much about being human as it is about saving dogs. His four-legged friends teach him to show compassion, humor, grace, and responsibility, characteristics in scarce supply lately. We could use more lessons from dogs and the honorary dogs who love them.

Magdalena Hernandez, MBA'02, is a senior editor.

The Sedgwicks in Love, by Timothy Kenslea; Northeastern University Press; 2006

Jane Austen wasn't being completely sardonic when she observed that a single man with a good fortune must be in want of a wife. For many centuries, marriage was chiefly about amassing and protecting wealth.

But eventually—especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—this notion began to shift to a more modern sensibility, which affirmed romantic love as the basis for matrimony. And long-held ideas about courtship, engagement, and marital happiness were suddenly in flux as well.

The nonfiction volume The Sedgwicks in Love takes a look at evolving lives and loves in the young American republic by examining two generations of an influential New England family.

Pamela Dwight and Theodore Sedgwick were married in Berkshire County, in western Massachusetts, in 1774. Theodore became a Federalist party leader in the U.S. Congress and a prominent state judge. Six of the couple's seven surviving offspring also married (daughter Catharine Maria Sedgwick, a successful novelist, the sole holdout).

Many in the clan were veritable Abelards and Heloises, unusually prolific writers of letters, diaries, memoirs, and journals. Author Timothy Kenslea quotes generously from their papers to craft a lively portrait of a complicated family falling into and out of love.

Issues around parental roles in matchmaking, domestic abuse, mental illness, and the shaky financial situations many widows found themselves facing crop up in the Sedgwick narrative.

An epilogue examines why Catharine, who had many suitors, chose to remain unmarried and devote herself to the creative possibilities of a single life. Jane Austen would approve.