Dr. Camuti writes of his 40 years as a veterinary practitioner, recounting little stories, correcting popular misconceptions, and defending his favorite of all beasts- the cat- fang and claw. Although he has ministered to celebrities' Siamese for two score (James Mason, Tallulah Bankhead, Imogene Coca) he insists 'there are no famous men or women where a sick animal is concerned'. One gathers from his book, however, that Dr. Camuti is no lower species Martin Arrowsmith. Awakening to the sick calls of the wild after being saved from a house fire by a pet cat, he goes on to putting himself instead of a geriatric St. Bernard to sleep, treating a papier-mache dog, and getting to know a pigeon with a penchant for eating seed out of his owner's navel- though any old navel would do. Among his favorite cats was a Persian named Flower, sentenced to remain in perennial heat because of an ovarian cyst, whose coquetry forced neighbors to alter every tom in the neighborhood for sake of a night's sleep; a paranoiac Siamese, Hercules, who'd been dropped on his head when only a little kitty; and the favorite of all felines, Rhubarb, whom Dr. Camuti saved from a nervous breakdown by absolutely forbidding any more night clubs or personal appearances. In the area of misconceptions corrected, Camuti insists that there's no such thing as a bad cat, that they are neither oversexed, innately evil, nor sneaky. He suggests we stop endowing animals with human attributes and appreciate them sui generis. No religious analogy is made. Animal lovers will like the book. Cat lovers will be crazy nuts for it. The stories are amusing in spite of their treatment.
Pub Date: July 9, 1962
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1962
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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