Elias Weiss Friedman, the Dogist, writes about life-changing dogs

If “This Dog Will Change Your Life” were a dog breed, it would be a border collie: sweet, fun to be around, a little hyper.

The book comes from Elias Weiss Friedman, who bills himself as the Dogist on social media, where he has 7.6 million Instagram followers. Friedman photographs dogs he meets and interviews their owners about the dogs’ personalities, eliciting gems like this about a Great Pyrenees named George Elliot: “She had to interview with the board of our building before we moved in. When she got there, she went around the table and gave each of them a paw. They liked her more than us.”

Friedman describes himself as a “dog enthusiast, dog evangelist, and dog documentarian (dogumentarian?),” which is a good place to warn you that there are far too many dog puns in his book. As I read, I occasionally pictured a stand-offish breed such as a chow-chow determinedly ignoring attempts such as “paw-litical” and silently begging Friedman to knock it off.

There are a few other peculiarities in the book, which, for instance, does not include photos (Friedman already published a book of them and you can refer to his Instagram, which I highly recommend, if you need a quick blast of cuteness and love).

A little editing could have tightened up some repetition in “This Dog” and it occasionally feels lazy. When he writes about Beacon, the therapy dog that helped the women’s gymnastics team prepare for the 2024 Summer Olympics, it seems odd not to mention that the dog was not allowed to accompany them to Paris, and for Friedman to “imagine” Simone Biles and Suni Lee’s feelings about Beacon. Why not ask them? (I also think it was wise for Friedman, who has built himself a dog-loving empire, to wait until the end of the book to note that his decision to launch his business was helped by the fact that his parents loaned him their pied-a-terre on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.)

Quibbles aside, the book is for humans what a chew toy is for a pooch: If you love dogs, I bet you’ll go back to it, again and again, for the great stories about our canine pals. There’s goofy stuff like a mention of a show dog whose human companions, with a very big wink, gave him the registered name of “Grand Champion He’s So Full of Himself.”

Friedman skips nimbly from dog-related topic to dog-related topic. Some are serious: how dogs have helped care for soldiers with PTSD, how dog breeding has increased health problems for dogs such as basset hounds, the alarming factoid that the emotional toll of the work means that “male vet[erinarian]s are twice as likely as the population at large to commit suicide, which seems like an alarming statistic until the second shoe drops: female vets are four times as likely.”

Mostly, though, “This Dog Will Change Your Life” is a collection of charming stories, such as the one about Friedman’s friend, whose story supplied both the title of the book and the proof of it. Or the people Friedman meets on the street who are reluctant to talk to him until they notice their dogs leading the way. Or why dogs may be able to learn tons of words but actually don’t need them.