Jill Abramson's case of 'Puppy' love

THE PUPPY DIARIES: Raising a Dog Named Scout, by Jill Abramson. Times Books, 242 pp., $22.

One night before bed, I checked the headlines on The New York Times home page. The top story was "Mission Unfinished," an in-depth look at the ongoing crisis in Afghanistan and Pakistan by the paper's executive editor, Jill Abramson. It looked interesting, but I had another Abramson work waiting on my nightstand.

It was "The Puppy Diaries: Raising a Dog Named Scout." That title, and the adorable baby retriever on the cover, caught my 10-year-old daughter's eye.

"Is that book . . . for grown-ups?" she asked delicately.

Well, sort of. Just as dogs give us a break from our complicated human lives, dog books give us a break from our complicated adult reading material. And some are really great, too -- like E.B. White's dachshund essays, Ted Kerasote's "Merle's Door" and Elizabeth Marshall's "The Hidden Life of Dogs."

But a dog book doesn't have to be really great to please dog lovers. It just has to be about dogs. To be coldly realistic, this is probably why, when Abramson introduced her puppy diaries to Times readers as an online column in 2009, it rocketed to No. 1 most emailed within the hour.

Abramson's story is not quite as funny or as moving as another canine classic, John Grogan's "Marley and Me," but it's along the same lines, entwining the travails and joys of raising a golden retriever with the rest of the author's life -- in Abramson's case, her job at the Times; her long, peaceful marriage; and two really bad accidents, one with a truck in Times Square and the other on a slippery slope in Yellowstone National Park.

Yet "The Puppy Diaries" is not much of a diary; Abramson is a journalist, not a memoirist. About as intimate as the book gets is a sentence such as this: "After the departure of our children, Buddy's death, and my accident, our home lives had become a little narrow and thin." By the next paragraph, "Thanks to Scout, Henry and I were doing more together as a couple." While Abramson is not big on personal revelations, she does love to get a quote. Experts, and their informative views on everything from pet health insurance to pet training to the role of pets in filling an empty nest, probably worked better in the column than they do here.

Nonetheless, I enjoyed reading about Scout, and about the Abramsons' previous dogs, both West Highland white terriers, Buddy and Dinah. And in addition to the simple, sweet pleasure of reading about the love between people and dogs, "The Puppy Diaries" offers a few more sophisticated treats. Though there's not a snarky word in the book, there are some backstage goings-on at the Times. For example, Abramson goes into detail about the dog-related gifts she's received from her colleagues. In the Buddy era, "Michiko Kakutani, the Times' chief book critic, was particularly generous: not only had she given me dozens of pairs of socks emblazoned with Westies, she had also given me an antique desk lamp with a bronze terrier perched on its base."

Unfortunately, since many people didn't know when Buddy died, the Westie-ana just kept on coming until Maureen Dowd, bless her heart, came through with the first golden retriever gift, a puppy painted on a plate. I relished the picture of these imposing, often scathing columnists shopping for dog tchotchkes.

I just hope they run a big picture of a golden retriever next to this review, so I can rocket to No. 1, too.