An irresistible collection of international cats, as photographed by an exuberant “cat dad.”
Hello, kitties of the world.
Bogle proudly calls himself a “cat dad.” His path to this form of parenthood wasn’t obvious. He didn’t live with cats when he was a kid. Inheriting his parents’ views—“Cats aren’t nice. They bite. Their pee smells”—Bogle was predisposed not to like them. “This cat is going to ruin my life!” he whined when a girlfriend told him they were going to care for her aunt’s pet, Kitt. Within a few hours, this 24-year-old was a new man. Kitt was purring into his shoulder and sleeping on his chest. He wondered: “What in the hell was wrong with my parents?” Bogle has since made up for lost time. He’s rescued cats, bottle-fed kittens, and, in his words, “watched approximately two million hours of English football (a.k.a. soccer) on TV with at least one cat sleeping on me.” A travel writer and photographer, Bogle began documenting his encounters with strays all over the world. His book showcases 20 places where he’s made feline friends. “When it comes to street cats,” he writes, “I admire how they can be back-alley tough; live on scraps; endure intense heat, extreme cold, and driving rain; and survive it all with nothing but generations’ worth of literal street smarts matted into their DNA, yet still crane their neck to say hello there, kind stranger, please immediately stop what you’re doing and pet me.” Among his “drool-worthy photographs,” as he justifiably calls them, are images of cats he meets in the parks of Lima, Peru: “Never in my life have I seen so many cats sitting on so many laps!” He spends time with cats that hang out amid the produce at a market in Santiago, Chile; on carpets in the old city of Marrakesh, Morocco; on Tashirojima (“Cat Island”) in Japan; and, if you please, the very welcoming Café des Chats in Paris.
An irresistible collection of international cats, as photographed by an exuberant “cat dad.”Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2025
ISBN: 9780762489145
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Running Press
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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