Come Back, Como: Winning the Heart of a Reluctant Dog
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Come Back, Como: Winning the Heart of a Reluctant Dog Digital Audiobook

Steven Winn (Author), Paul Hernandez (Narrator)
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 308 ratings
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Steven Winn and his wife, Sally, held out for as long as they could. When the San Francisco couple finally gave in to their only child Phoebe's pleas for a dog, they adopted a scraggly terrier mutt from a local animal shelter. The new family pet, Como, turned out to hate men—especially the author—and proved to be a cunning escape artist. Traumatized, single-minded, and exceptionally clever, Como was bent on breaking Winn's sanity and self-respect, his bank account and his heart.

Come Back, Como is the story of one man's hilarious and poignant quest to win the trust of a dog who wanted nothing to do with him. With humor and pathos, Winn describes the maddening but ultimately rewarding effects Como had on his family, the misadventures and ordeals and terrifying events he and his dog endured together, and the greatest lesson Como taught him: that loving a dog can make us more human.

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  1. Author
    Steven Winn
  2. Narrator
    Paul Hernandez
  3. Audible release date
    January 1, 2009
  4. Publisher
  5. Program Type
    Audiobook
  6. See all details
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Product details

Author Steven Winn
Narrator Paul Hernandez
Audible.com Release Date January 01, 2009
Program Type Audiobook
ASIN 0061962589

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4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
308 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Leslie A. Sullivan
5.0 out of 5 stars Unsentimental Salvation
Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2009
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As a UC Berkeley instructor, I encouraged students not to superimpose their point of view on an author but instead, as a good detective would, find out what an author intends. To help, in this instance, click on Amazon's hard cover version of the book to the video trailer and listen to Winn. From what he says and does in the book, Come Back Como was never envisioned as a fluffy warm fuzzy, nor was it aimed at a dog-owner audience only, certainly not dog experts. That's why it begins in a broader context, not in a full description of Como. The book's structure softly indicates the author's larger purpose.

Vivid descriptions from the belly-laugh producing toilet episode to the wrenching accident moments amply create the specific world of the Winn family as well as all that is known about Gandalf before they adopt him. This deliberate simplicity discloses the author's fluid writing skill. For example, the dog's name changes from Gandalf to Como to "Z." Winn provides a context for each change that signals the significance of those crucial internal shifts for everyone intimately involved. For some, those shifts may be uncomfortable. In a perfect world, it would be wonderful if every dog adopted from a shelter found itself in the company of experienced "dog people." But Winn knows all too well that ours has never been a perfect world, and if shelter animals - as well of those of us who have been damaged to some extent by our origins, as all of us, in some form or other have been -- had to wait for people with such skills, their fates would be oh-so-different from Como's.

Delineating the particular dog almost invisibly huddled in a corner of his shelter cage, the particular family who chooses him in that state, the details of the families that have produced Mr. Winn and his wife allows the reader to begin to sense the universal themes that embrace us all -- types of "shelter dogs," if you will.

Winn creates the unfolding of a journey in which people and dog become intertwined, a journey that mimics for every reader how we discover meaning and especially how we share it. Such an unfolding is common to and, indeed, expected in fiction. But taking an actual story and sifting through its elements to determine how to capture what the best of fiction always does is not so easy. Thus, looking back at what "the" means in the preceding paragraph.

One superb story aspect is the amount and type of change required of each family member - including Como, the important catalyst for the family members' discovering salient features of who they really are, what they want, how they achieve those wants, and how that achievement allows them to grow.

The book grounds itself in a story about a particular family and expands to the human family to which we all belong. Families from which each of us comes, families that we create or join. And families in which a pet (unlike most other nations in the world) can become as important as Como (in this instance) chooses. In microcosm, what happens to Como and to his family reveals the ever-evolving way in which every sentient creature travels through the world, living experience, making sense of it, holding on to what is good and productive and uplifting and attempting to recreate it.

Yet the book is never preachy nor does it set itself up as a life guide by emphasizing the mistakes we all are subject to and the hopeful fact that we can learn from them. It is, as the best of books, an unsentimental example of an event with which all of us can identify and within which all of us can see ourselves - sometimes with pants about our ankles, other times with throbbing hearts rushing to save a life. It is a true story both in its commonality and in its universality -- simultaneously simply and sumptuously -- filled with the breadth that life offers each of us: tears and laughter, heartache and hope, dreams and the daily facts of what we find in our path and how we deliberately choose to see all of it.
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fuzzylop
4.0 out of 5 stars Good read. Happy ending.
Reviewed in the United States on May 5, 2018
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The writing I simple. Good Story without a sad ending! I could just see this cute dog doing all of these things because the owners
Did not know that there was a lot they did not know about working with dogs.
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JKD
5.0 out of 5 stars Steven Winn's winning memoir
Reviewed in the United States on August 7, 2010
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I like books that gather emotional force and resonance in their final chapters, rather than leaking air like sad little wrinkled balloons (a fictional example: Don DeLillo's White Noise, compelling and engaging--until DeLillo had to engineer an ending). Fortunately, Steven Winn's Come Back, Como: Winning the Heart of a Reluctant Dog grows expansive in its final pages.

Come Back, Como comes to an end as seismic events are shaking Steven's world and family: his wife is unexpectedly hospitalized; his daughter is nearing graduation from high school, and contemplating a college on the other end of the continent; he is in transition from a full-time writer for the San Francisco Chronicle to a "free" agent and author (imagine the rumbling anxieties, merely hinted here, that come from leaving behind the 20-year security of a salaried job for the unknowns of the writer's marketplace).

As the ground beneath Steven's feet shifts, throws him off balance, his writing intensifies, causes the reader to sit at attention, hang on last words. Take this passage, for instance, when a walk on a bluff above the San Francisco bay with his high maintenance mutt Como triggers distant memories of his emotionally distant father's half-buried emotional life:

"Austere and all but mute about his own feelings, my father kept duty and principle at the foreground of his life. He was a small-town Missouri boy who had worked extremely hard to achieve what he did in academic and banking, and he took a steady, grindstone approach to everything from his job to yard work to his expectations of others. Even on the tennis court he exuded a determined and largely joyless demeanor, thwacking the ball and frowning as he labored back into position for a return shot. I'm sure he loved my mother, who had a series of trying medical crises in their marriage, and my sister and me. But sometimes, especially when I was growing up in the cone of paternal silence, that wasn't always obvious.

Grengy, our family dog, unlocked my father. From the moment that temperamental animal came into the house, Dad was lavish, almost foolishly forthcoming with his affection, babbling baby talk, protectiveness, and pride. Nothing was too good for Gengy--lean ham from the table; a shiny patent leather Christmas collar; the prime riding spot, right behind my father's neck, on the front seat of the car. It was baffling and even a little hurtful. My sister, Judy and I used to ask each other, in all seriousness, if we thought our father cared about Gengy more than us. But in later years, long after Gengy and then our father were gone, we've taken to marveling at how dogs and young children were the keys that flung open a door that often remained fearfully or defensively shut."

Come Back, Como is rich in passages like this one, which transcend the book's ostensible subject. Yes, on one level it's a book about a dog, but more importantly and interestingly, it's about the way in which this dog's bizarre story becomes, in the author's words, "another chapter in the unexpected and the unpredictable, the perpetually unfinished story of disappointment and resilience, menace and consolation, desolation and love, that life serves up in its unforeseeable way."
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A M Kozub
3.0 out of 5 stars good for dog lovers
Reviewed in the United States on September 25, 2018
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An enjoyable read. Proof that some dogs take a long time to adjust to new surroundings, but always worth the effort.
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Amazon Customer
4.0 out of 5 stars Come Back,Como.
Reviewed in India on January 21, 2022
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A true story about the bringing home of a dog from an animal shelter. a dig who wanted to have nthig todo with humans,on account of his traumatized past with the human who had him before this. How the author finally manages to win him over for good. A good book, for animal lovers worth reading and keeping. I fact all people should read such books of love and compassion and the power of endurance that such love can give.
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