Classical Cats: The Rise and Fall of the Sacred Cat

Rating:
Summary: excellent reference about classical cats
Review: A domestic animal, the cat has always been an essential part of modern society and culture. The author of this great book offers a completely comprehensive background - religious and mythical - of the feline's importance in Ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman times. With few illustrations, this is a book that is most interesting for its content and most useful for its extensive research and information.

Rating:
Summary: Problems with compilation and focus, but interesting info
Review: This book describes the evolution of the domestic cat, and its history through Egyptian, Greek, and Roman classical periods, as well a brief foray into early Medieval times. It provides a comprehensive review of these periods, with many footnotes.

However, it never quite fulfills the criteria for either a good popular or academic book. The writing style is rather dense for a popular book, and it can meander rather incoherently at times. For an academic treatise, it jumps to conclusions, without clearly supporting them in the text. It can be quite windy and repetitive, like an undergraduate trying to stretch to fill a word quota on a term paper. It also includes topics rather far afield from the stated focus of the book, seeming to include random unrelated tidbits the author found during his research. Some of them are interesting in their own right, but again seem like filler. Also, some of these discussions appear to have an unfortunate tone of anti-Catholic polemics.

That said, the book will be of interest to cat lovers, if you can get past the writing style to the collection of data unlikely to be found in such a comprehensive collection elsewhere.