Chadzilla ROARS!!!

All My Patients Are Under The Bed: Memoirs of a Cat Doctor - by Dr. Louis J. Camuti with Marilyn & Haskel Frankel

Dr. Louis J. Camuti shares some of the more memorable moments from his sixty years of practicing house call veterinarian medicine in New York City.

All My Patients are Under the Bed is the third of fourth "Cat Book" that I have read in the last year or so.  (The Cat Who Came for Christmas and The Dog Who Rescues Cats are two others.)  Having just about finished it, I think it is safe for me to say that, if you have read any one of these books, then you have read them all.  Each "Cat Book" is narrated by a moderately eccentric (or soon to be eccentric) person who shares heart warming stories/observations about the equally eccentric, or just unique, animal(s) that has changed, or brought insight to, the narrator's life.

It is, at times, difficult for me to decide which of the two subjects these books revolve around is the more fascinating; the cats or the eccentric people who live with them?  Camuti's book is filled with both. It seems that you can't have one without the other.  Camuti tells of the unsettling lengths that many people will go to please an animal that has captured their hearts.  Like the otherwise intelligent woman who, during WW2, found herself "a person of interest" because of her obsessive procuring of the Japanese crabmeat her cat consented to eat.  Or the couple that turned their apartment (and, later on, their house) into a Rube Goldbergian playground for their cats.  The story that had me shaking my head in disbelief was the one about the kindly woman who cared for a cat so vicious it had to be locked in a room whenever visitors came calling.  If the cat got loose during a social call, and it did, then the unfortunate visitor wound up in the hospital, getting stitches.  While I love animals, something so dangerous to others clearly needed to be euthanized.  But, as Camuti shows again and again, people have intellectual blinders when it comes to the animals that have captured their hearts.  No one is safe from being made a fool for love.  Camuti also reveals how devoted James Mason, Tallulah Bankhead, and other New York City dwelling celebrities were to their pets.  Not content to just spin yarns about pets and the people they own, the house call making vet also recommends what he thinks is the best kind of food to feed your cat (Would you believe beef baby food?) and what kinds of toys are the safest for it to play with.  Yarn, it seems, is a death trap waiting to be sprung.

While All My Patients are Under the Bed did not capture my heart, it did hold my interest until the end.  But I think it will be quite some time before I read yet another one of my wife's many beloved "Cat Books."

Cat Tales: Classic Stories from Favorite Writers - Edited and with Photographs by Robin Upward

A collection of short stories and essays about that enigmatic and fanciful household companion known as the cat.

The back cover blurb for Cat Tales describes the anthology as "The Perfect Gift for the Literary Cat Lover, Gorgeously Illustrated with Full-Color Photography,"  which is as good a description as any, I guess.  The contributing authors, Anton Chekov, Saki, Mark Twain, and Emile Zola, to name but a few, are all renowned and respected literary figures, so those wanting good cat stories won't put the book down disappointed.  Robin Upward's photographs are an "ah" and "ooh" inducing collection of cute and cuddly pet portraits, so those just wanting to see a variety of breeds in a variety of cute pictures won't put the book down disappointed, either.

I think it's a reasonable assumption that Cat Tales was designed to adorn the top of a coffee table, or to be placed in another location where someone would be passing the time and find his or her self in need of some quick reading or visual stimulation to keep from becoming bored.  With the exception of Stephen Vincent Benet's The King of the Cats, which is twenty pages long and not even about a real cat, but a musical conductor with a tail, the stories and essays are short and easy reads.  Lewis Carroll's The Cheshire Cat really isn't a self-contained story, just the segments of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that feature the spectral character.  Anton Chekov's Who Is To Blame? tells of an ill tempered teacher's disastrous attempt to train a kitten to hunt mice.  Colette's The Long-Cat shows how the saying "No good deed goes unpunished" also applies to cats.  Rose Fyleman's A Persian Tale, the anthology's shortest offering, reveals the mystical origins of the titular breed.  Charles Perrault's Puss In Boots explains how receiving a cat as an inheritance can be a very rewarding thing.  Saki's Tobermory will no doubt have most of its readers seriously rethinking the notion that granting their pets the ability to speak would be a good thing.  Marguerite Steen's Little White King is just a collection of observations of a very special kitten discovering the world around it.  If King's final line doesn't pluck at you heartstrings, then you don't have any.  Mark Twain then shares the hilarious story of how Dick Baker's Cat came to detest quartz mining.  Emile Zola closes the book with a study of The Paradise of Cats.

"The literature of the cat is vast," states animal loving author Cleveland Amory in his introduction.  I'm sure any cat loving visitor will appreciate that these choice morsels have been left out to enjoy.

The Cat Who Came for Christmas - by Cleveland Amory

Writer Cleveland Amory tells the touching story of how a Christmas Eve animal rescue led to him becoming a cat-owned human.

If there was one thing that my late wife loved above all other things (save for our son, Christopher) it was cats.  Her bookcase was overflowing with books like The Cat Who Came for Christmas and its inevitable sequels, The Cat and the Curmudgeon and The Best Cat Ever.  When Christmas, her birthday, or our anniversary (which was a mere three days before Christmas) came around, I, being one who adores reading above all other things (save for writing and my son), would scour the bookstores looking for a new book about a cat, or just about cats in general.  In one of those ironic twists of fate, I was a bookworm who had married a woman that did not like to read - and who resented my attention being place anywhere other than her.  Come to think of it, I had a cat like that once.  But she would read (and love) these books.  After her death, her cat library migrated over to mine.  Reading these books of hers is a wonderful way to feel close to her, especially during the Christmas season.

The Cat Who Came for Christmas is yet another one of those books that writers with pets with whom they have become emotionally attached feel compelled to write.  The reader gets to share the joy of not only finding "Someone Special," but vicariously living through the learning curve of the adjustment period.  Although Amory digresses at times with some interesting tales of the animal activism he was involved in (such as painting the baby seals, ramming an illegal whaler, and rescuing burros in the Grand Canyon), the book is a touching look at a slightly eccentric man getting to know the slightly eccentric cat (aren't they all?) that has decided to own him.

Cat lovers will have, no doubt, already have read it.  Those who love those that love cats should read it as well, just to see what all the fuss about the purring-hissing-scratching little fur-balls is about.

The New Roger Caras Treasury of Great Cat Stories

Thirty-five tales about cats of all types: good, bad, and, being cats after all, indifferent.

It took me forever to read The New Roger Caras Treasury of Great Cat Stories, not because it is bad, far from it.  I just have a problem with reading theme anthologies.  I quickly get bored reading story after story about the same subject, and The New Treasury contains five hundred pages of cat stories, which is far too much feline fiction for me to focus on for any length of time.  So I read a story or two here and there in between other books, rather than plow through The Treasury in one big gulp.  I can only recommend that you do the same, unless you really adore cat stories, that is.

While each story in the anthology is connected by having a cat either as its focus or as an important character, the nature of the tales themselves veers wildly from from whimsical to serious, from outlandish to realistic, with a touch of non-fiction.  Being a long time horror/fantasy/sci-fi buff, I appreciated the contributions of Fritz Leiber (The Cat Hotel), Ursula K. LeGuin (Schrodinger's Cat), Andre Norton (Noble Warrior), Mercedes Lackey (Skitty) and, most of all, Charlotte Macleod (A Long Time Sitting) and Elizabeth Moon (Clara's Cat).  On the whimsical side, Susan Shwartz offers Asking Mr. Bigelow and Carole Nelson Douglas the P.I. parody The Maltese Double Cross.  The literary offerings include such choice tales as Cornelia Nixon's Affection, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer's Chicago and the Cat, and Merrill Joan Gerber's Touching Is Good for Living Creatures.  Those yearning for some true cat stories have Cleveland Amory's A Cat for All Seasons, James Harriot's Oscar the Socialite Cat (my favorite of the bunch), and editor Roger Caras's Teddy's Tale.  There are quite a few more picks in the litter, but I will let you, if you so choose to, discover those by reading and enjoying the anthology for yourself.  Besides, tastes and opinions vary by a sizable margin.

My only real complaint about The New Roger Caras Treasury of Great Cat Stories is the absence of two classic cat tales: Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat and H.P. Lovecraft's The Cats of Ulthar.  Both deserve to be included in the anthology.  Then again, this book is The NEW Roger Caras Treasury of Great Cat Stories and, perhaps, those tales were collected in the OLD Roger Caras' Treasury of Great Cat Stories.  Perhaps I'll hunt that collection down some day and check.