Cat Book

Although anyone who is fond of animals will find this book absorbing, cat owners in particular will value it for its comprehensiveness and clarity. Meticulously researched, it corrects many misapprehensions and offers much new information about cats/ biology and behavior. Muriel Beadle has drawn upon an amazing variety of original sources - from seventeenth century naturalists to modern animal behaviorists, from memoirs of cat fanciers to scholarly reports by specialists in fields as diverse as ecology and genetics, veterinary science and neurophysiology. But this is also a history of the cats long association with human beings with special emphasis on the origin and development of human attitudes toward the least domesticated of our domestic animals. There are contributions from literature (Herodotus to Kipling), the social sciences and the law. Mrs Beadle has organized this great mass of material into a coherent and gracefully written narrative, as enjoyable as it is instructive. Some passages will make the reader chuckle. Others will induce a murmur of astonishment. This is both an old and a new look at the cat, and even those people who think they know everything about their companion felines will find some surprises here.