Rating: 
Summary: Great Read for Literate Dog-Lovers
Review: Ackerly is a Brit through and through, and what I loved most about this book was the contrast between his ever-so-proper British prose and it concomitant stiff-upper-lip attitude and the explicit biological facts of living with (and breeding) an animal. Loved it!
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful Series, But What Happened?
Review: After reading a review in Out Magazine of "We Think the World of You" and seeing the beautiful book cover, we obtained the new NYRB World of You" and "My Father and Myself." Congratulations to the publisher for bringing these books back into the main stream. We had begun to collect all of these beautifully produced and designed books in the series. We made gifts of "My Dog Tulip" and now I find my replacement copy has been completely changed! It no longer matches the lovely numbered set. What can NYRB be thinking? As a gay man and dog lover, I must say I have found reading these Ackerley treasures a delight. I must say I was more enchanted with "My Dog Tulip" when the cover image left something to my imagination--it spoke to the nature of the relationship of the author and Tulip. Now I see an elderly man--it has changed the character in my mind. Even though I know from "My Father and Myself" that he (the author) was handsome once. Why on earth have these books been re-done and cheapened--ruining their collectibility, when they were perfectly done-- just last year? I feel cheated! Bring back the art and the beautiful paper! Will the book be rewritten next?
Rating: 
Summary: To each his/her own
Review: All the reviews here, positive and negative, make good points about the book. Ackerley never felt the need to please everyone, and this book shouldn't. I found it to be a strikingly honest account of what it means to be an extreme animal lover (Ackerley thought that the worst thing about the Vietnam War was that innocent animals were killed), written in the elegant and graceful style for which Ackerley was renowned. However, Ackerley never cared about being distasteful, and I imagine that i I'd read the book at a different time in a different mood I might have found it unecessarily offensive, too.
Rating: 
Summary: Superb form, distressing content.
Review: Being a dog lover but not a dog owner who believes that it is cruel to keep most dogs in an urban environment, and especially a large dog in a flat as the author did, I found this memoir not to be my cup of tea. Humans are portrayed in it as curious, rather unsympathetic creatures, whilst the dog at the center of his love, is romanticised despite the loving detail with which the author describes the bodily functions of the animal. I can understand though, its appeal to those with an obsession with their dog who find humans too argumentative, contrary or difficult. An instance of "horses for courses" so to speak.
Rating:
Summary: Something new
Review: I admit I skimmed over, towards the end, some of Ackerley's agonized accounts of Tulip's heats. But I relished most of the book, and I am as grateful to the author as I am to any writer who does something authentically new and different, and does it well. This book should be read in conjunction with Ackerley's other books, especially "My Father and Myself." By itself "Tulip" may seem to be the document of a very strange man, but considered with Ackerley's whole output it comes to look like just the most groping and unflinchingly honest of Ackerley's remarkably free and honest writings. Frankly it's amazing that a book written more than 30 years ago, on a topic (the lives of animals) at the center of contemporary worry and action, should seem so advanced, and just so ... beyond the pale. And, of course, Ackerley's prose is faultless. Every serious reader should give this book a chance.
Rating: 
Summary: Possibly good for potential dog breeders
Review: I liked this book, although as a dog owner I found myself shaking my head and shocked at many of the things that were done with this dog... I do think this is a great book for anyone who is thinking of breeding their dog as it gives a good account of the trials of breeding, raising puppies, and the problems that can occur for the pups and mother.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointment
Review: I read a review of this book a few months ago in a dog magazine. It sounded good, I made a note of it. I must say the book has been a disappointment to me. I agree with two of the reviewers before me--the book lost its punch in last half with the endless breeding babble. Also I obtained a cheapened and altered book from the one I saw pictured in the review. I would say this book is over rated and over priced.
Rating:
Summary: NOT for dog lovers
Review: I was going to get this book for my sister-in-law, but thank goodness I read it first. I found it to be offensive from cover to cover. This is a man who professes to love his dog, describing her genitalia in disturbingly rapsodic detail, and then decides to drown her puppies, because all he really wanted was for her to have sex. This is a man who finds it hilarious to let his dog do her business in his friends' homes. I can't imagine anyone actually enjoying this book. I found it upsetting.
Rating:
Summary: Not my breed...but
Review: If you love or ever have loved a dog of any breed, you'll take something away from reading this book. Recommended to me, I didn't think this was my breed of book, but it turned out to be. It's that kind of book, which is why I'm now ordering a copy as a gift for a friend who I think will like it, but would probably never find it. I'd recommend both reading it since you've found it (you are reading this review, right?) and if you also give a copy away and it's not your friend's breed of book...at least it also happens to look good.
Rating:
Summary: A Real Dog of a Book ... and Not in a Good Way
Review: If you want to be immersed in a definitely 1960's I'm-obsessed-with-Freud take on dog ownership from someone who should never have been allowed to own a dog ... if you're dying to discover in ad nauseum detail the fecal and urinary habits of an animal whose owner lacks the least understanding of training a dog ... if you yearn for all the details of the miseries this animal goes through whenever she's in heat, this is the book for you. One has to wonder at the dark workings of Ackerley's psyche. There's a strident and distressing pornographical note that sounds throughout the book as he writes of his beloved Tulip. Here he is, writing of the first time she goes into heat: "I was enchanted. That small dark bud, her vulva, became gradually swollen and more noticeable amid the light gray fur of her thighs as she walked ahead of me, and sometimes it would set up, I supposed, a tickle or a trickle or some other sensation, for she would suddenly squat down in the road and fall to licking it. At such moments I could see how much lager it had grown and the pretty pink of its lining ... I felt very sweet toward her. She also felt very sweet towards me." He goes on to describe in great detail how she mounts his leg and what that's like for the 2 of them. And it's not as if this is a one-time thing. No, folks, the ENTIRE book is a treatise detailing such events: "Now, squatting here and there upon other dogs' droppings... like some famous chef adding to a prepared dish the final exquisite flavor, the crowning touch, she left behind her in the snow as she flew a series of sorbets, and her crazed attendants were so often and so long delayed in licking them up that they eventually fell far behind." This is not exactly the kind of thing I care to discover about an animal, however charming the dog herself might be. But what REALLY disturbed me was the misery Ackerley put this poor animal through in his obsession to find her "a husband." Worse still, once she finally managed to produce a litter, Ackerley's inclination, was to kill all the pups. "In the bathroom ... I prepared a bucket of water and a flour sack weighted with such heavy objects as I could lay my hands on ... How could I distract proud Tulip's attention while I carried out my dark deed? Soon, no doubt, she would wish to relieve nature and my chance would come." If this is the kind of a boy-and-his-dog relationship you want to know more about, go for it. Personally, I was left feeling I'd exposed myself to the dark workings of a pretty twisted mind, and I wish I hadn't learned there are people of relate to animals the way Ackereley does.
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