2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Lovely, August 15, 2000
The 1st thing I look for in Cat books are 'real' pictures of cats and was a little disappointed when this offered none.
Nevertheless, the information contained would please any cat lover. Ranging from cat-breed information to cat names, cats in history, cats in Hollywood and cat quotations, you would surely love this 'little' big book of cat tidbits.
The text are in large print with cute illustrations. You'll never be a moment bored.
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1.0 out of 5 stars
An unconscionable waste of paper, and full of errors, October 18, 2011
This review is from: The Big Book of Cats (Hardcover)
This book is over 600 pages long, and weighs nearly two pounds, but has so little actual content that it easily could have fit in a normal book well under 100 pages. Each page has a sentence or three at most (an average of only 75 words or so, and one only had 12), printed in a font size that is at least twice larger that will be found in any large print book. The book is made to look substantial, but is actually fluff, and just ridiculously wasteful. On the "half up" side, at least the paper is cheap, barely better than newsprint, so perhaps the waste isn't that bad. (The "half-down" part being that my copy is already browning a full 1.5" from the margins inward on all three open sides, as if it were from 1898, not 1998. You get what you pay for.)
The content is clearly "borrowed" (i.e., plagiarized) from innumerable online and offline sources. Not one of these sources is credited, much less properly cited. When it comes to cutesy stuff like good and bad names for cats, this is irrelevant, but it's actually important when it comes to facts.
And this book is full of many false facts, usually misreadings of multiple sources, stirred together with assumption of correlations that don't exist, with a dollop of illogic on top, into a palimpsestuous mishmash with no connection to reality. As just one example, the book solemnly declares (p. 568), "Tailed Manx are rarely seen, since breeders dock the kittens' tails to avoid a painful arthritic condition in adult cats that often requires the tail's amputation." Every bit of that is nonsense. The actual facts are that unscrupulous breeders used to dock the tails in an effort to sell more kittens - no one but a breeder wants a Manx cat with a tail. But these days, Manx cats are common, and no one's going to be fooled by this, so the tail-snipping is rare today. While the book did get correct the fact that "rumpy" (entirely tailless) Manx should not be bred together because often lethal defects occur in the offspring, it is overbreeding that results in painful lower spine and hip conditions, known as "Manx syndrome", among "rumpies" and occasionally "rumpy risers" (those with a tiny stubbin of cartilage at the root of the tail). The fully tailed ("longy") and even "stumpy" (half-tailed) **do not exhibit this problem**. The so-called logic on that page is just tortured. "Longy" Manx cats are simply regular British Shorthairs that happen to have a copy of the Manx tailless gene without expressing it. There's no reason at all to think they would have spinal or other problems related to "Manxness", any more than a person bearing but not expressing the gene for albinism is going to magically wake up one day with no pigment. Genetics just doesn't work that way.
And this is just a single case. The book is riddled with severe errors of this sort. Of course, if any of the various "authors" (copy-pasters and reworders) of this book had actually done any genuine research and ensured that they were drawing from reputable source material instead of random Web pages, and synthesizing their own idea of what the facts might be from piecemeal and largely unrelated information and misinformation, this book might actually be worth reading.
That said, at least this pile of often counterfactual trivia is well arranged in sections. It could make an okay bathroom reader, if you don't take anything it says very seriously (especially nothing about medicine, genetics, nutrition or other topics that require real research from credible, scientific sources - a major reason to avoid a lot of cat "health" books, by the way).
In summary:
LOLCAT SEZ
EPIC FAIL
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5.0 out of 5 stars
If you love cats you will love this humorous and informative book., October 8, 2009
This review is from: The Big Book of Cats (Hardcover)
I like dogs, but I love cats more just because they are mysterious beautiful creatures. I have had both cats and dogs together in my home and without a doubt, the cats always ruled. This big 624 page book has numerous cat facts, beautiful cat poetry, and interesting and entertaining cat stories. This was a fun book to read. In conclusion, this is a book every cat lover will love.
Rating: 5 Stars. Joseph J. Truncale (Author: Never Trust a Politician).
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