Reviews for Kitten and Cat Care

The average rating for Kitten and Cat Care based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-05-03 00:00:00 Ravin HURLOLL This isn't a review, it's a resolution: I WILL finish this book I DID finish this book. It was hard going. I'm such a cat person I couldn't resist the title, but in fact the book isn't about a cat at all. The title is just a hook to get cat lovers like me to part with $$$ hoping we might understand something more about the totally mysterious thought processes of a cat. What the book is about is Dr Dosa who isn't very interesting. He's married with kids and has non-disabling arthritis. He's very ordinary but nice, I'd like him for my GP. The book is really about his job which is treating Alzheimers' patients in a nursing home. The cat, not a friendly creature, knows when people are dying and goes to sit with them. We don't know any more about Oscar and anyway the book isn't about him and an investigation into how Oscar gains this knowledge that beats even medical technology's ability to predict death. The book might have been a lot more interesting if I hadn't just finished Atul Gawande's Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End which is about the options for end-care mostly in old people and especially Alzheimers and explains, among other things, how the model of the nursing home with cats (and dogs and birds) that is where Dr Dosa and Oscar came to be. Atul Gawande is a wonderful writer, David Dosa just writes serviceable prose and then again Gawande is a more interesting person and goes into his subject very thoroughly leaving you much to think over and regretting the book is so short. It's always the same with Gawande's books, you want more. It's rather the opposite for Dosa's "Making Rounds with Oscar", less would have been greatly appreciated. I WILL finish this book

Review # 2 was written on 2019-08-17 00:00:00 Richard Glenister It seems I am in the minority here, but I thought this book was just okay. It was billed as a story about a cat's ability to sense when dementia patients in a nursing home were approaching death and his dedication to remaining with them during their final hours. The real focus of the book, however, was on Dr. Dosa's experience treating his patients with dementia. That subject is certainly important and interesting, but the approach of revealing almost the entire story through dialogue between himself and the nursing staff and/or family members of the patients (most of which seemed stilted and manufactured) wore thin after a while. He brought up some serious issues in his own life, including a chronic health condition, but then left them as loose ends, making me wonder why he brought them up in the first place. [return][return]Dr. Dosa started the book by admitting that he is not a cat person, but that he wanted to understand more about how Oscar knew to do what he did. Aside from that initial curiosity, there was no real understanding of why he was so interested, nor any major conclusions revealed through his experience. Although technically a dog person, I love all animals, and anyone who spends any amount of time with them would not be at all surprised by Oscar's gift. I wish the book had focused more specifically on the patients' families perspectives on Oscar rather than the doctor's.[return][return]Finally, the book went on for too long. The story was initially published in a medical journal. The story would have been better served by taking that essay, putting it into lay terms and publishing it as a magazine article.[return][return]Nonetheless, I learned quite a bit about the disease of dementia, and the book was an easy and quick read. Not great, but not horrible.