By Lisa Boss, Grand Rapids Public Library, Main Branch
A man is haunted by a photograph. Taken at an archeological dig, at Ein Mallaha, in the Jordan Valley, it presents a puzzling tableau. Looking down into a grave site formed 12,000 years ago, the photo reveals the skeleton of a man reaching out to another, much smaller skeleton — a puppy.
The author can’t seem to push the question out of his mind. Why is the old man reaching out to the puppy in his burial site, so long ago? And why is he so interested in this particular question, when he isn’t all that taken with dogs anyways…
Being a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist, when a question really gets under his skin, Jon Franklin often ends up turning it into an article, a series, or in some cases, an entire book. And so it was that almost 20 years after contemplating the press release photo of the Jordan Valley excavation, The Wolf in the Parlor was published.
This is a great book for any dog lover, but it’s much more. Franklin ranges widely, and the book is like an evolutionary drama, a pre-historical mystery, and a neurobiological puzzle — all forming a Gordian Knot, unraveled by a master storyteller.
There is a delicious irony in the book, in that the man pursuing his scientific research ultimately ends up forming his hypothesis, through the quality time that he spends with his wife’s dog. A relationship that he had considered inconsequential at first becomes a key to not only his research, but to the very question that bothered him so much in the first place.
Why was the man in the grave reaching out to the puppy, as if his spirit needed the animal to complete him?
