Going to the Dogs

By Erich Kästner

Book Overview

Going to the Dogs is set in Berlin after the crash of 1929 and before the Nazi takeover, years of rising unemployment and financial collapse. The moralist in question is Jakob Fabian, "aged thirty-two, profession variable, at present advertising copywriter . . . weak heart, brown hair," a young man with an excellent education but permanently condemned to a low-paid job without security in the short or the long run. What's to be done? Fabian and friends make the best of it--they go to work though they may be laid off at any time, and in the evenings they go to the cabarets and try to make it with girls on the make, all the while making a lot of sharp-sighted and sharp-witted observations about politics, life, and love, or what may be. Not that it makes a difference. Workers keep losing work to new technologies while businessmen keep busy making money, and everyone who can goes out to dance clubs and sex clubs or engages in marathon bicycle events, since so long as there's hope of running into the right person or (even) doing the right thing, well--why stop? Going to the Dogs , in the words of introducer Rodney Livingstone, "brilliantly renders with tangible immediacy the last frenetic years in Germany] before 1933." It is a book for our time too.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1590175840
• ISBN13: 9781590175842
• Release Date: November 2012
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.1" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Traveling Around The US From One's Living Room

I have been on a travel essay/arm chair travel reading kick (I am usually the legal and medical thriller fan)and picked this book on the title and cover since I did not know the writer. What a blast I had trekking across the US from New York City to Alaska down to New Mexico and back to New York City with Marilyn and her husband, Sandy!! I started the book on a Sunday morning and finished the book by Sunday night. It was...

A refreshing book

I had never read a book such as this until after I read Bill Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods". Then I got on a Travel Essay kick and read everything I could get my hands on. This book is so funny ! Even the parts that you can tell the writer is serious about just scream "hilarious". I can't wait for more from this author !!

Soul searching RVer

I must say this is an entertaining read; one that gives much encouragement to making the choice to quit, sell up, and hit the road. Ms. Abraham does much soul searching and philosophizing about the choice she and her husband made, even getting down right personal sometimes. I loved her self-deprecating anecdotes of what it is like for a born 'n bred New Yorker to discover that the vast beyond isn't as deprived of culture or...

Captures the true feeling of freedom

This is the best book I've read regarding the RV lifestyle. As an Escapee, a 50-something free spirit with a wife who has lived all her life in Astoria, Queens, this book says it all about the freedom from the corporate world. For those of us having to work on the road, nothing was mentioned regarding finances. This is the only shortcoming of the book. It takes guts to do it but the rewards are many.

You touched my heart !

I first saw Marilyn and her husband on a talk show in Pittsburgh. Since I have always wanted to drive an RV to Alaska, I bought this wonderful book and read it in one afternoon. I laughed, I cried and was deeply touched. If they hadn't gone on this trip of miles and of the spirit, I believe that they would have died years before anyone put them in a cemetary. I loved her touching stories of the people they met along the way,...