in review – account maintenance
Price: $7.99
(as of Jan 09, 2025 16:48:15 UTC - Details)
This great treatise on cats describes the history, manners, habits of the cat and explores its relation to folklore, music, painting, law, poetry, and fiction. It has long been considered the best book ever written about the cat.
ASIN : B09LBBWWC9
Publisher : Rare Treasure Editions (November 8, 2021)
Publication date : November 8, 2021
Language : English
File size : 468 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Not Enabled
Word Wise : Not Enabled
Print length : 318 pages
Reviewer: LORENZO FUHR
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Excellent
Review: Excellent book. A very good option during a coofee break.
Reviewer: Mervin
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Book about cats in books
Review: I have asled my wife not to read this book because of the chapter in which there is a vivid description of how the people used to hurt the cats.
Reviewer: Owl
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Caressing the Tiger
Review: Carl Van Vechten was a man about the art, music, literary, photographic world of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Among his achievements was celebrating the Harlem Renaissance and creating hundreds of perceptive beautiful photographs. He died in 1964 but did not really make it past WWII in his interests and there is some doubt if he ever made it much beyond the fairly wealthy world. An intimate and ever helpful friend of Gertrude & Alice (he was Gertrude's literary executor), Van Vechten---judging by this book----could quote Baudelaire, that marvelous cat-lover, but may have been as unaware of Eliot's "Book of Practical Cats" as he was of Marquis "Archy and Mehitabel."within this frame, "The Tiger in the House: A Cultural History" may be particularly delightful for readers who---can handle French as fluently as English since about a quarter of the book is in French---are charmed by the by-ways of history, belief, and experience specially anecdotes---enjoy hearing about the rich & famous of 1880 to 1930, whose names may now send us to the internet---like hearing about the cat (pussy, Grimalkin) in other countries particularly Japan and Pharonic Egypt--and about the cat in the occult, law, art, music, poetry, and literatureThis edition includes a discerning critical introduction appreciative of Van Vechten and suitably ailurophile as well as the text and over 20 pages of illustrations. Many are probably unique sources of scholarship on the cat, with a topically organized & annotated bibliography and a quirky index which includes only names mentioned in the book.. There is a chapter of art criticism, for instance, that concurrently makes the claim that no one has painted or drawn cats adequately and offers encomiums of drawings of cats-as-people whose artistic beauties sure escaped me. Was this tongue-in-cheek irony? A send-up of art criticism? Or straight face?None-the-less----outdated, incomplete, superceded by recent works on cats, this unusual book has a place in social/literary history and to this cat-lover, it was a splendid engaging read and no doubt, a re-readANY ALERTS? To some readers, and I am one of them, the derogatory religious, racial, and ethnic slurs may be really off-putting. That Van Vechten was not called out on this when he wrote it and probably would be (and how) today might be encouraging, but it bothered me more than the somewhat high-art and arch writing style. Thus four, not five starsBut I loved so much in these pages including the Chinese, "The cat was created so man could caress the tiger." and the great insistence on the individuality of cats. Other readers may too.
Reviewer: Philip Jenks
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Five Stars
Review: Great coffee table book for cat lovers. Full of fun and fascinating anecdotes.
Reviewer: Mike Hawkins
Rating: 1.0 out of 5 stars
Title: This is a Worthless Piece of Crap!
Review: Amazon has omitted all of the author's copious footnotes and abridged most of the chapters. The book does not even contain either a publisher or a copyright date. It is a worthless piece of crap. What Amazon has done to this great book ought to be actionable in a court of law.
Reviewer: rj
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Nice informative book
Review: Nice history of cats. I was a little confused about various well known people and their cats. I didn't know the people.
Reviewer: Lorraine Keesh
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Rather pedantic
Review: This may be the ultimate cat book for some but I didn't appreciate the overload of Frenchisms, and the dwelling on mistreatment of cats all through their history. It was an informative piece of work but I found it fairly rough going.
Reviewer: James R. Calder
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: A Cat Bible
Review: The best -- and most complete book -- you'll ever find about cats. Urbane and very worldly. Superbo writing and insights, and more than you wanted to know about cats vs dogs, to boot. "A cat bible," said the London Spectator.