About this title: This charming memoir chronicles Montgomery's touching friendship with a generous soul, who just so happens to be a pig, and the valuable lessons she learns about family, community, and the pleasures of the sweet, green Earth.
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Description: Acceptable. Book is in good reading condition. Cover has wear at edges and corners, and may have creases. Spine has wear at edges and creases. read more
Description: Good. 2006-Hardcover---Dust Jacket shows some shelf-wear. -Used-Good-Hall Street Books proudly ships from Brooklyn, NY. All orders are processed and shipped within 24 hours, M-F. 100% money back No-Worry guarantee with expedited delivery and delivery confirmation available. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Date Published: 2006
ISBN-13:9780345481375ISBN:0345481372
Description: New in new dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 225 p. Contains: Illustrations. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Date Published: 2007-04-17
ISBN-13:9780345496096ISBN:0345496094
Description: Like New. Like new softcover in excellent condition, no writing, non-smoking home, clean text, binding tight, Christian business. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Date Published: 2006-05-30
ISBN-13:9780345481375ISBN:0345481372
Description: New. Book is Brand New, Gift condition. Free tracking # included! International buyers are welcome. We ship every business day. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed! read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Date Published: 2006
ISBN-13:9780345481375ISBN:0345481372
Description: Very Good in Very Good dust jacket. 0345481372. Hardcover with dust jacket, book in Very Good to Fine condition, jacket in Very Good to Fine condition, no stamps, writing or marks, a very nice looking book and jacket, 8 pages of color photos, read more
Edition: First edition. Illustrated.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Date Published: 2006
ISBN-13:9780345481375ISBN:0345481372
Description: Fine in fine dust jacket. Faint crease in front endpaper; otherwise, as new, clean & unmarked. 1st ed. hardcover. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 225 p. Contains: Illustrations. Audience: General/trade. Adults & children will love this true tale of the pig who won hearts in his neioghborhood and eventually across the country. read more
Description: Fine in fine dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 225 p. Contains: Illustrations. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Date Published: 2006
ISBN-13:9780345481375ISBN:0345481372
Description: Fine in Fine jacket. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. Like-new condition-Appears unread-Price inside dustcover: $21.95-NO writing, marks or tears inside book. Illustrated with color photos. 229 pages-?Christopher Hogwood came home on my lap in a shoebox. He was a creature who would prove in many ways to be more human than I am. ? ?from The Good Good Pig A naturalist who spent months at a time living on her own among wild creatures in remote jungles, Sy Montgomery had always felt more comfortable with ... read more
"I've been a sucker for books about animals since I began reading -- at the age of 3. I must have read Lightfoot the Leaping Goat at least 100 times in my childhood -- and every other animal book the public library had. I am a fan of James Herriott and every book about gorillas, chimps, dogs, horses, Elsa the lioness...and I found Moby Dick unbearably sad. Just thinking about those whales gives me pangs of empathetic suffering. I also have read widely in the scientific literature about animal cognition and emotions -- even a study on mice and their social groups!
I didn't think there was an animal book I could dislike, but Sy Montgomery managed to write one.
To begin with, I was especially drawn to a book about a pig because of my father's tales of his boyhood in Ukraine and the neighbor's pig that he played with. Also, my aunts, who had the job of taking their horses, cows and sheep to the common pasturage in the village and then taking them back home, always spoke with wonder and joy at how the pigs ran ahead of the pack of village animals, squealing all the way home. So, I was prepared to read about the intelligence of a pig kept as a pet.
Well, this "good good pig" did nothing but eat like a pig, grunt, produce high quality good-smelling manure, and get out of his pen, then root up the neighbors' lawns. The only reason he got famous is that his owner used his picture on her Christmas cards and also invited the neighbors' children to scratch his belly, which, predictably, the pig loved. But so do my dogs and even wild rhinos! There is not one thing in the entire book that shows that this pig ever had a thought or that pigs in general have any intelligence at all. Montgomery reiterates throughout that pigs are like people, but she doesn't show it, except to note that their skin is like human skin. As for the pig's ability to get out of any gate she was locked behind, we had a sheep, hardly the genious of the mammalian community), who could get out of her pen no matter how we contrived to fasten the gate: with wire, with wood, with latches, from the inside, from the outside. Even when we padlocked it, she figured out how to loosen the inner block of wood so that the padlock fell down. Then, when she got out, as she always did, she came to our back door, knocked on it, and, as soon as someone opened it, ran upstairs to our son's bedroom. The "good good pig" never did anything so interesting.
The author spends most of the book, the parts when she's not congratulating herself on her brilliance, gooddness, and what-all, on recounting how she got the whole town to contribute slops for the "good good pig," and how she went through the slops every day to ensure that no meat was in it. That's fun reading? The contents of slop buckets? Or the quality of the pig's manure?
This is a real gross-out waste of time. I started out thinking pigs were intelligent, interesting creatures like every other creature I've known or read about, and ended by thinking that pigs are stupid and boring. Oh, she did mention the pig would greet her happily when she went to feed him --as did her chickens. That is hardly surprising. Having had many animals over the years, I know that all of them will go as fast as they can towards the person who feeds them. How did this thing get published, and why did I buy it? Why does anyone?"
"Although this book is subtitled, "The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood," the focus is not on Christopher but on the life of the author Sy Montgomery. A naturalist and a writer, she has studied and written about, among others, the pink dolphins of the Amazon, the gorillas of Zaire, and the man-eating tigers of the Bay of Bengal. When not traveling, she lives with her husband Howard Mansfield, a writer and historian, in New Hampshire. During the years in which The Good Good Pig is set, she also lived with Christopher (an orphaned runt piglet who eventually grew to 700 pounds), a number of hens collectively known as The Ladies, and Tess, a twice-rescued border collie, as well as a variety of humans who rented out half of Sy and Howard's house thereby becoming part of their extended family.
Family is the central theme of the book. Sy's relationship with her parents was strained throughout her adult life, and although they came to something of an understanding in her parents' later years, because they refused to acknowledge Sy's Jewish husband, a complete reconciliation was impossible. Nonetheless, Sy creates her own family, centered around her husband and her animals, in particular Christopher Hogwood, and the people who come to be her family because of their shared affection for Christopher.
What I admire about Sy's approach is that there is no preciousness when it comes to Christopher. She loves him, and he is her family, but she never forgets that he's a pig. Although she gives him due credit for his intelligence and emotional intuitiveness, she doesn't anthropomorphize him or any of the animals that she deals with on a daily basis. She rejects the idea that she and Howard, childless by choice, have somehow substituted pets for children, as insulting both to animals and to all parents of human children.
There's a fair amount of pig history and lore included, which tends to drag the narrative down at points, but overall this is a joyful story and a lesson in how best to live, courtesy of Christopher, who "knew how to relish the juicy savor of this fragrant, abundant, sweet, green world. ... That a pig did not become bacon -- that's proof that we need not 'be practical' all the time. We need not accept the rules that our society or species, family or fate seem to have written for us. We can choose a new way." The life of Christopher Hogwood is an object lesson in practical philosophy and a reminder that there is happiness everywhere, be it in a grassy field on a sunny day or a bucketful of day-old bagels and a cream sauce of indeterminate origin."
"Animal lovers will be delighted by this hilarious, heartwarming story of a writer and naturalist, her husband - and their pig. A vegetarian who keeps chickens as pets, the author can't resist the chance to try to save the runt of the litter belonging to some pig-raising friends. As the pig, named after conductor Christopher Hogwood, grows and thrives, he leads the author into new territory in her life and work. You won't want to put this book down!"
"I think I have about reached the saturation point for animal protagonist stories right now. I loved Dewey, and I loved Enzo - and I really like Christopher Hogwood in this book. this was the true story of a couple who adopted a runt-of-the-litter pig - and watched him turn into a 750 pound pet. Sy,the author, writes well - but I sometimes got tired of her verbal meanderings, and of her mentioning how she grew up loving animals more than humans. I got a few interesting tidbits from reading this book: 1. Wall Street was named for a wall which was built in 1652 to keep out roaming hogs. 2. sharks can grow endlessly because their skeletons are made of cartilage not bone, and they live in a weightless environment. I have to admit, I didn't finish this book. Once Christopher started getting ill, I figured I had read enough. No more details were necessary. He lived a very happy life, and I'm sure he enriched his human family."
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