Dog Bites Man: City Shocked!

By James Duffy

Dog Bites Man is a witty, tongue-in-cheek saga detailing the House-That-Jack-Built downfall of Eldon Hoagland, an innocent Columbia University professor who has become New York City's good-government mayor. The hilarious spiral begins when Hoagland, after an evening of drinking with his old Princeton roommate, staggers out of a Fifth Avenue apartment house, steps on a dog relieving itself alongside the mayor's car, and gets badly bitten. His cop-bodyguards shoot the dog and in the process terrorize Genc Serreqi -- an illegal Albanian stud who walks the dog (in addition to more intimate chores) for Sue Nation Brandberg, a former Native American beauty queen and socialite widow of a billionaire -- and he flees the scene. The mayor's bodyguards attempt to cover up their involvement in the shooting, but Scoop Rice, an eager young reporter for a muckraking Manhattan weekly, investigates and exposes the canine slaying. Then extreme animal activists, aided and abetted by every other interest group with a grievance against the mayor, tie up the city (not to mention air traffic around the world) in a monumental demonstration. Also offering encouragement are the rabid, newly amalgamated daily Post-News and the state's first woman governor, Randilynn Randy Randy Foote, who nurses an ancient grudge against the mayor and hastens his political demise. In Dog Bites Man, novelist James Duffy mixes it up in a lively tale of American politics in which rich movers and shakers, politically correct crusaders and scandal-hungry media types conspire to bring down a New York City mayor. All the hazards of American public life are on hilarious display here, in the freshest novel of mannersand most outrageous political satire of the year.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743210824
• ISBN13: 9780743210829
• Release Date: May 2001
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 302 Pages
• Weight: 1.28 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Very Funny "Dog"

A satire that works. Outrageous and worthy of Evelyn Waugh. No kidding!

bingo

A terriffic read. More than a parody of NYC post the current mayor, Man Bites Dog is a too plausible tale of fiction which has all the hallmarks of reality about urban politics today and the absence of political leadership mangnified by media run by mental midgets. This is an entertainment in the mode of Graham Greene (but the locale is not Havana but NYC). There is no message other than "wake-up".