Secrets of the Cat: Its Lore, Legend, and Lives

✍ Scribed by Holland, Barbara

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 212 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9780061978043

✦ Synopsis

Review

“An absolutely wonderful and sometimes hilarious and always soulful book.” (Mademoiselle )

“Smart, bright, well-written....A book about cats as good as this one is rare.” (Smithsonian )

“Perhaps the best aspect of the book, combined with Holland’s style, is the appropriately low-grade temperature of the cat/human philosophizing—nicely situated between Sartre and Wild Kingdom.” (Trenton NJ Times )

“May be the most elegantly written, witty, perceptive statement about felines ever published.” (Philadelphia Inquirer )

“Charming....Will soften the heart of even a certified ailurophobe.” (Publishers Weekly )

Product Description

What is really going on behind those luminous feline eyes?

Affectionate yet aloof, intelligent and inquisitive yet dangerously careless, the more-or-less domesticated house cat intrigues us as no other animal can. Now Barbara Holland offers cat lovers a fascinating, funny, and refreshingly candid look at their feline companions: their history, lore, and secrets, and their complicated relations with people and with each other.

Secrets of the Cat is a lively appreciation of cats as we know and love them, with witty analysis and fresh observations about felines both high and low. Here are Winston Churchill’s ginger tom, who attended cabinet meetings; Teddy Roosevelt’s cat, Slippers, who came to dinner; and even the author’s own George II, who was bitten by a mouse and adopted by a blue jay. Barbara Holland’s warm, vivid speculations on cats’ lives and times—on their social, psychic, and mythological legacy, and their impenetrable mysteries—will give readers a delightful cat’s-eye view of the world.