Coffee with a canine: Randi Hutter Epstein & Ellie and Dexter

Today's featured trio at Coffee with a Canine: Randi Hutter Epstein, Ellie and Dexter.

The writer, on how the dogs joined her household:

We picked up Dexter from a breeder upstate on the day that I found out I was pregnant with Eliza, my fourth child. We got him en route to our summer vacation in the Adirondacks. It was absolutely bucketing out, and we put this soggy puppy in our car, along with three other children and a four-year-old Golden Retriever. (The Golden is no longer “with us.”) I never wanted a toy dog, but for the past three years, my daughter Martha has been begging and pleading for a little dog that she could hold and cuddle. She promised she would walk the dog every morning and that she would be happy for the rest of her life. I believed every word. I thought it would be really helpful to have my teenage daughter walking the dog before school and then gliding merrily through adolescence. So I got the puppy. We’ve had Ellie for about a year and a half. Martha has yet to wake up to walk her in the morning and while she is basically a happy kid, but I wouldn’t say there...[read on]

Randi Hutter Epstein, MD, is a medical journalist who has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Daily Telegraph, and several national magazines. She is the author of Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank.

Among the praise for the book:

“[A] sharp, sassy history of childbirth.... The author’s engaging sarcasm, evident even in a caption of an illustration of an absurd obstetric contraption—'Nineteenth-century Italian do-it-yourself forceps. The fad never took off'—lends this chronicle a welcome punch and vitality often absent from medical histories. Roll over, Dr. Lamaze, and make room for Epstein’s eyebrow-raising history.”
—Kirkus Reviews

Learn more about Get Me Out at the publisher's website, and visit Randi Hutter Epstein's Psychology Today blog, Birth, Babies, and Beyond. Read an excerpt from Get Me Out and listen to the NPR story about the book.

Writers Read: Randi Hutter Epstein.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Randi Hutter Epstein, Ellie and Dexter.

--Marshal Zeringue