Customer Reviews

Creature Comforts: The Adventures of a City Vet

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...Or anyone who fancies New York. I really enjoyed reading Steve's descriptions of New York City from the perspective of a guy from a small town in New England.

The book is basically a memoir of a veterinarian who appeared for a while on Romper Room. But it's also a great story. We not only hear about a lot of interesting patients and their humans, stories that are by turns poignant and very funny, but also about Dr. Kritsick's mentor and his best friend and the events that led him to his career decision. The stories take place in five different animal hospitals: Boston's Angell Memorial, two private New England clinics (the one where Steve cleaned cages after school and the one where he interned), New York's ASPCA, and the prestigious Animal Medical Center.

I also relished reading about the romantic troubles of the stunningly handsome author. (There's a picture on the back cover). He was just a real person.

My only gripe was that the ending seemed a little anticlimactic, but maybe that's just me. It IS a memoir, not a novel. Life usually is pretty open-ended. That said, I found it quite a page-turner, especially for its genre. Shooting victims, an invisible dog, a snake with skin disease (belonging to a movie-star look-alike anthropologist), suicidal cats jumping from twentieth story windows (will they survive?), the drama of the animal hospital employees and their personal lives, etc. proved to be very entertaining and diverse subject matter.

This is probably not a book that will change your life, unless of course you're considering veterinary medicine as a career, but it is a quick and charming read. You'll find a lot of interesting and multidemensional characters stuffed into a small number of pages (250). Steve Kritsick seems kind of like a young, handsome, city-dwelling James Herriot. A guy who just really cares about animals and their people, and has a knack for telling stories about them.