ANIMAL DOCTORS

Ostensibly thirteen autobiographical accounts by thirteen different veterinarians, these are really, as the author acknowledges in a preface, composite and fictional profiles ""based loosely"" on the comments and experiences of the nineteen vets she interviewed. What such a method might lose in literal authenticity Curtis more than makes up for in pace, style, and even immediacy--not to mention a managed balance of male and female doctors; farm, pet, zoo, and hospital practice; humor, inspiration, and gore; and--as one country practitioner puts it--""the thrills and the drudgery."" And you forget as you read that they aren't real individuals--the young couple who share a pet practice laughing over a woman worried because her male puppy doesn't lift his leg to urinate, the activist who organizes protests against horse abuse, the woman who spends a Sunday afternoon removing a mass of bones (""followed by a putrid accumulation of stool"") from the rectum of an old hound dog. Realistic and readable--and way out front of the usual career book.