Customer Reviews

Cats: A Comprehensive Guide to the World's Breeds

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I bought this book because I am thinking about buying a pedigreed cat in the future and I wanted a resource on the temperments, care requirements, histories, and appearences of many different cat breeds.

That said, this book excelled in some areas and failed me miserably in some others...

The photographs:

There are great photographs throughout the book that are large and in color, some full plate/full page and many half plate/page. Let it be noted that the great photos are the ONLY reason this book is getting a "3 star" rating from me and not the "2 or 1" it deserves based on lack of text and information.

The Information / Text:

At most, this book provides a couple of paragraphs of information on SOME breeds, however, most breeds get about half a paragraph apiece. The information provided isn't particularly insightful and some breeds have a list of "good" and "bad" points... i.e. good-playful, bad-naughty.
Most pages have no text other than photograph captions...Some of these retell text from the breed information paragraph.

Allocation of space in the book:

Some breeds, the most popular (persians, burmese, siamese, asians, and orientals,) get a huge amount of space...i.e. The persian section is 57 pages long! While other, less-well-known breeds get hardly anything...i.e. the egyptian mau and sphynx are accorded about a half-page and one photograph each.

There is also a six page long "kitten" picture section. The only purpose for this, I would suppose, is that they had extra breed photos that they bought and had to put them somewhere (and didn't have anything else of value to put at the back of the book). Not that I have anything against cute pictures of kittens...but, I can see all of them that I want by buying a wall calender at my local barnes & noble.

British or American photographs / standards?:

This book is decidedly British in terms of photographs of specific breeds (the Havannah Brown is under the Oriental group), and groupings of cats. I had hoped for more from a book claiming to be "comprehensive".

In a nutshell:

My review boils down to this, if you want a nice coffee-table book of cat photographs, then this one will not dissappoint. However, if you are looking for more "meat" in terms of descriptions of breed temperment, history, etc, this book will leave you wanting more, far more.

Also beware if you are particularly looking for information on a rarer breed, this book won't have it and will probably only have a picture or two at best... By the same token, if you are a fan of persians, siamese, burmese, asians, or orientals, this book will have plenty of photographs for you to drool over. Although, sadly, no "contemporary" style burmese for comparison.