An entertaining ramble through a roster of purebred canines, from the "flufftastic" Samoyed to the French bulldog-currently the most popular breed in the U.SWith just a perfunctory nod in the frontmatter to Labradoodles and other "designer dogs," Swinney offers a mix of familiar and potentially lesser-known picks from the estimated 350 recognized breeds. She devotes a paragraph to each canine's physical characteristics, uses as a work or hunting animal, supposed personality, and likely ancestry. In smaller type at the bottom, she adds briefer notes on ranges of size and weight, life span, maintenance requirements, trainability, and, just for fun, what the dog likely would and wouldn't say if it could talk. (English cocker spaniel: "Look, pheasant!" "I'm sad.") Readers on the hunt for a family pooch or detailed care instructions should look elsewhere; casual ones won't mind the omissions (Airedale, American pit bull) or that the entries come in no evident order. Blümel creates frequent visual links by pairing many of her strong-lined, lino cut–esque paintings, contrasting, for example, a sleek saluki with a shaggy Alaskan malamute (both chewing on or sniffing at shoes) or showing a bloodhound tracking the facing page's corgi. The arbitrary arrangement will stymie systematic research, but even confirmed students of the canine clan are likely to find new breeds to cherish here.Bowsers for browsers. (index)(Nonfiction. 7-10)