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    My Life Among the Underdogs: A Memoir
    My Life Among the Underdogs: A Memoir
    My Life Among the Underdogs: A Memoir
    Audiobook5 hours

    My Life Among the Underdogs: A Memoir

    Written by Tia Torres

    Narrated by Tia Torres

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    From one of the most respected figures in the dog rescue community come the harrowing, funny, and inspiring stories of nine incredible dogs that shaped her life.

    Tia Torres, beloved underdog advocate and star of Animal Planets hit show Pit Bulls & Parolees, chronicles her roller-coaster life in this heartwarming memoir featuring some of her best-loved dogs. With inimitable honesty and characteristic brashness, Tia captures the spirit and heart of these intelligent and loving canines, while carrying us behind the scenes of her TV show, into the heart of post-Katrina New Orleans, onto the soundstages of Hollywood films, and even to the jungles of Sri Lanka.

    Tia has devoted her life to shattering the stereotype that Pit Bulls are dangerous, vicious predators. As the top dog at the Villalobos Rescue Center in New Orleans, the largest Pit Bull rescue in the United States, she and her team have rescued, rehabilitated, and re-homed hundreds of animals that might otherwise have been destroyed. As she puts it, Most of the stories in this book are about animals (and a few humans) that needed someone to believe in them and a purpose in order to show their true nobility.

    Each dog Tia writes about here has overcome abuse, trauma, neglect, or just bad luck to become a stalwart, loving companion to Tia and her family. You'll meet Duke, whose intelligence and matinee-idol looks made him a star in movies and music videos; Junkyard Joe, whose singleminded passion for tennis balls was channeled into expertise as a drug-sniffing dog; Bluie, the unswerving protector of Tia's daughter Tania; and a host of other unforgettable canines.

    My Life Among the Underdogs

     is above all a love story one that is sure to grip the heart of anyone who has ever owned or been owned by a dog.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJan 15, 2019
    ISBN9780062563019
    Author

    Tia Torres

    Tia Torres is the founder and proprietor of Villalobos Rescue Center, the largest Pit Bull facility in the United States, and the star of the hugely popular Animal Planet show Pit Bulls & Parolees, which has been on the air since 2009. After serving six years in the army, Torres worked for a Los Angeles city program to curb gang violence, serving as a liaison between the city and gang members. She also became an advocate for Pit Bulls, forming the Pit Bull Support Group, which offered free classes and assistance for Pit Bull owners. In 2006, she launched Underdawgz, a program that pairs parolees with rescue dogs. Tia lives somewhere in the swamps of south Louisiana with eight dogs.

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    Reviews for My Life Among the Underdogs

    4.5/5

    45 ratings6 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Amazing book! Not only can this extraordinary woman rescue, but she can write.
    • 5/5
      The book gives a nice background on who Tia is with little background nuggets to the main story lines of the early seasons of the show.
    • 5/5
      This amazing book almost made me cry. Tia is a great narrator and I learned a lot about dogs who are mostly only mentioned in passing in the show.
    • 5/5
      6 out of 5 stars.

      I love this book as much as I love my pitbull and 2 other rescue dogs, which got my emotional looks many times during listening. For me, Tia, her family, everyone working for / with the rescue deserve unconditional recognition. This book is just so amazing and honest that I couldn't possibly love it more.

      Thanks to Tia and her team, for their work and sacrifices they had to make getting it out there publicly. And for sharing this piece of your lives. It means so much.
    • 5/5
      What an amazing story of hardwork, dedication and love for animals. If I admired Tia and her family before this book just multiplied the feeling. And having her narrate the books is amazing. Dont think it twice just listen!
    • 5/5
      I think it's fair to say Tia Torres, founder and head of Villalobos Rescue Center, has lived a varied and interesting life. She has, especially, known a lot of wonderful, challenging, and interesting dogs.She tells her story organized around those dogs--Cougar, Duke, Moose, Lucky, and others, in California and in Louisiana. The rescue started as a wolf and wolf mix rescue, and the shift to pit bulls was gradual and almost accidental. Working with wolves and, as a trainer for the entertainment industry, with a variety of large and dangerous animals, she developed a confidence and an awareness of body language that helped her both to work with dogs, and to establish her reputation with the rescue community.Her more chaotic and unreliable relationships with her fellow human beings also helped to focus her attentions and efforts on dogs.Torres is a great storyteller, and in both the writing and the reading she makes her experiences compelling and absorbing. Yet she's also a very private person, and there are a lot of things I'd be interested to know more about, that she simply passes over. She respects her own privacy, and doesn't share what she doesn't want to share. Nor is she overly concerned about linear storytelling. Each of the chapters is orderly in itself, but the arrangement of them is more a flowing from theme to theme, than starting at the beginning of her story and continuing on to the present time. Sometimes this means we get two different perspectives on the same incident, how it seemed at the time, and how it seemed later, after more reflection and/or more information.Because this is a book about Tia Torres' lifetime in animal rescue, it unavoidably involves some dogs, some dogs very important to her and to her four children, dying. There's no avoiding it in telling her story properly, but for some people, who would otherwise love the book, that will be a deal-breaker. That's unfortunate, but neither do I want to trick anyone into starting a book that they won't be able to enjoy and finish.It's an excellent book, though, and highly recommended.I bought this audiobook.