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Come, Let Me Guide You A Life Shared with a Guide Dog

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Image of book cover showing author with her guide dog Teela, a beautiful ocean, sandy coastline, and blue sky in the background

Come, Let Me Guide You

A Life Shared with a Guide Dog

Come, Let Me Guide You explores the intimate communication between author Susan Krieger and her guide dog Teela over the ten-year span of their working life together. This is a book about being led by a dog to new places in the world and new places in the self, a book about facing life's challenges outwardly and within, and about reading those clues—those deeply felt signals—that can help guide the way.

In her previous book, Traveling Blind: Adventures in Vision with a Guide Dog by My Side, Krieger focused on her first two years with Teela, her lively Golden Retriever-yellow Labrador. Come, Let Me Guide You continues the narrative, beginning at the moment the author must confront Teela's retirement and then reflecting on the entire span of their relationship. These emotionally moving stories offer the reader personal entrée into a life of increasing pleasure and insight as Krieger describes how her connection with her guide dog has had far-reaching effects, influencing not only her abilities to navigate the world while blind, but also her writing, her teaching, and her sense of self. The book culminates when a new guide dog, Fresco, enters their life and Krieger and Teela seek to school him in their ways.

Come, Let Me Guide You is an invaluable contribution to the literature on human-animal communication and on the guide-dog-human experience, as well as to disability and feminist ethnographic studies. It shows how a relationship with a guide dog is unique among bonds, for it rests upon highly regulated connections yet touches deep emotional chords. For Krieger, those chords have resulted in these memorable stories, often humorous and playful, always instructive, and generative of broader insight.

Photo of Teela in sunlight ready for work

From the Reviews

"Feminist ethnographer Susan Krieger continues to reveal the gifts of blindness in her story of interspecies communion with her guide dog, Teela. At her wedding, the dinner table, the classroom, Teela expands Krieger's family in fresh ways. Their profound rapport goes beyond pet or prosthesis to an interdependent working companion relation of mutual recognition and reliance." —Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, author of Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature

"Susan Krieger's account of her ten years with Teela, her guide dog, is a moving look at the blossoming of a human-canine relationship, and much more as well. Krieger is a sociologist and a feminist studies professor at Stanford who began gradually losing her vision two decades ago. Her intimate relationship with Teela and her descriptions of how the two of them began to radically change each others' lives will seem familiar to anyone who has a deep bond with an other-than-human companion. It is also an emotional look at life's changes. Krieger discusses her battle with vision loss and Teela's role in helping her cope. In addition, the book details how, after Teela began getting close to retirement, the pair's relationship would change again as a new guide dog moves in—a subject rarely discussed in more conventional narratives. Come, Let Me Guide You is a lovely and important book for anyone interested in the precarious nature of identity and in shifting relationships—human/human and human/non-human." —Margo DeMello, author of Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies

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About the Author

Susan Krieger, a sociologist and writer, teaches in the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stanford University. She is the author of six previously published books: Traveling Blind: Adventures in Vision with a Guide Dog by My Side (2010), Things No Longer There: A Memoir of Losing Sight and Finding Vision (2005), The Family Silver: Essays on Relationships among Women (1996), Social Science and the Self: Personal Essays on an Art Form (1991), The Mirror Dance: Identity in a Women's Community (1983), and Hip Capitalism (1979).

Listen to an Interview with the Author


How to Order

To order Come, Let Me Guide You, please visit Purdue University Press, Amazon, or a retailer of your choice. The book is available in print, ePub, ePDF, and Kindle editions and as an audiobook from Audible and iTunes.

To obtain an accessible version for the blind or print disabled, please contact the publisher (pupress@purdue.edu), Bookshare, Learning Ally, or the National Library Service.

COME, LET ME GUIDE YOU: A Life Shared with a Guide Dog
by Susan Krieger

Purdue University Press, 2015, 290 pages
ISBN 13: 9781557537140, Cloth, $24.95
New Directions in the Human-Animal Bond