A smart, sarcastic, illustrated look at the cat-keeping lifestyle.
A short collection of humorous vignettes from the life of a cat owner.
Maggots’ (Cupcake Factory, 2015, etc.) short book, lavishly illustrated by Jacobus, gives readers dozens of lively, humorous glimpses into the always problematic dynamic between cats and their owners. Overall, the author enhances the immediacy of this account by casting many reflections here in the form of diary entries of both cat and man, and these are filled with a raucous humor that will make this short book enjoyable for cat owners everywhere. The interactions in these pages may be fanciful—humans and cats simply talk back and forth to one another, and there’s a buddy-movie vibe to the whole thing—but they’ll nevertheless be immediately recognizable to cat people specifically and pet owners in general. When the narrator, Human, asks his pet, Old Cat, “What are you going to do today? Why don’t you make yourself useful and find a part-time job or something?” many will nod knowingly when the feline replies, “Nah, I’m just gonna lie around, maybe lick myself. I’ll probably destroy some of your expensive furniture. Anyway, catch you later.” The book touches upon nearly every aspect of cat ownership, from the damage they do during their seemingly manic bursts of energy to their scattershot understanding of sanitation to their complete disregard for human privacy. The cat-as–alarm-clock, the cat-as-noisemaker, the cat-as–garbage-disposal—and, charmingly (though always with a cynical edge), the cat-as–friend-and-companion—are all brought to life in short scenes illustrated in either full-color images or energetic pen-and-ink drawings by Jacobus. Readers get a cat’s-eye perspective on everything from the pets’ wanderlust to their hatred of baths to their curious, and often repulsive, habit of presenting their owners with killed and mutilated animal corpses as presents. Both sides liberally express their exasperation (“Do you know what it's like as a single father raising a brat of a cat?” the human asks at one point), but there’s an undercurrent of grudging affection in these pages that will likewise strike cat owners as familiar.
A smart, sarcastic, illustrated look at the cat-keeping lifestyle.Pub Date: March 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5233-0730-2
Page Count: 38
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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