Book Review: The Cat's Meow

 By Jonathan B. Losos

• Pub Date: 2023 

• Where I bought this book: Left Bank Books, Saint Louis, Mo. 

• Why I bought this book: The cover has a cat

*****

Asked to help me review this book, Callisto had but one word

    Cats are pretty much unchanged in the 20 million some years they've lived on earth.

    Plop an African wildcat down in your backyard, and you'd take her for your neighbor's cat or one of the community cats out for a stroll. The wildcat  -- from which  domestic cats evolved -- may be a bit bigger, with longer legs, and perhaps a bit more leery if you reached out to pet it. But that's it.

    Even through their 3,000 years hanging out with humans, cats have stayed the same. Perhaps they are a little friendlier, with humans and with each other. Other than that though, you'd have a hard time distinguishing them from their ancestors.

    They will easily revert to their feral ways if left alone -- and many modern cats are unhoused and wild, and scavenge our towns and cities for their food and reproductive needs. And cats are both fertile and promiscuous -- when a female is in heat, she will have a string of males lined up waiting for their turns. It's one of the few times male cats hang around with each other, and the females will take on all comers. It's not unusual for a litter of cats to have kittens with different fathers.

    So cats know how to reproduce, and this book explains it, sometimes to a fault. That's because the author is a evolutionary biologist (who normally studies lizards) and took up this study as a labor of love.

    But ...  

    Sometime he goes a bit overboard on the evolutionary science. And when he gets into the breeding section, it all starts to get a bit creepy. Humans have changed small, "domestic" cats more in the past 70 years than natural selection did in hundreds of thousands. And many of those changes seem to be for the vanity and whims of humans, and do more harm to the animals for the sake of a cuter cat.

    Take, for instance, the Persian or Siamese breeds, which no longer are recognizable.

... thanks to selective breeding, modern Siamese and Persian cats are unlike any feline species that have ever existed, either today or in the past. They are more different from each other than a lion is from a cheetah or a domestic cat.

    Indeed. Today, the vain include people who want to make a cat into a smaller version of the tiger. Getting the stripe pattern down is difficult, but they cross-breed various cats to get the look they want. They are not there yet, but they are trying. And Losos writes about them with scholarly disinterest.

   The failures are handled -- for instance, for the breed to be called the "toyger" -- rather obliquely, in a footnote at the bottom of page 222, quoting Darwin quoting Lord Rivers, who bred greyhounds back in the 18th Century: "I breed many, and hang many." That may not be happening, but let's not kid ourselves.

    Breeding cats for our pleasure is certainly not in the cats' best interests.

Book Review: The Curator

  By Owen King

• Pub Date: 2023 

• Where I bought this book: The Novel Neighbor, Webster Groves, Mo. 

• Why I bought this book: I liked King's work in Sleeping Beauties

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    King has written the rare novel -- one that is multi-layered, complicated, yet eminently comprehensive and readable.

    It has a weird setting in distant time and place but one that's vaguely familiar -- reminiscent of Victorian England, with a few Dickensian characters thrown in for good measure.

    They live in a city on a sea that sounds much like many places in our world.* The land has its succession of kings and wars, its poverty and wealth, and its exploitation of both. There's revolution in the air amidst the magic. And there's those odd cats.

    But while the when and where is left unnamed, we know it's not in our area of the universe. The first sign is the description of a solar system with a sun and 11 planets. The second is the double moon.

Callisto sometimes expressed concern
about the presentation of cats in the book

    The novel is long, and takes a while to get going. But once it does, it's a fast moving page turner. We learn there's been some type of uprising of the poor against the rich; the government has been overthrown but is hanging on up north; a temporary group has taken power and is trying to keep things running, but people's daily lives have changed little.

       The story focuses on several people caught up in the aftermath, who are trying to keep up as strange, fantastical things happen around them. They are unclear about what is happening, and so are we. It's either magical, led by a secretive unknown group, or simply the will of the omniscient cats.

"And when we die, if we've been decent, and if we've been good to the little ones here" -- the man gestured at the cats languidly picking their way over the rocky ground -- "there's a Big One, the Grand Mother. She comes long an picks us up by our scruff, like we were her own young ones. ... She takes us to where it's soft an warm an the milk runs forever an She protects us."

    Near the tail-end of the book, King pens an explanation, such as it is, for much of what has happened. It's not all encompassing, but it helps. It explains who the characters are and what they represent. It also explains the power and authority of the cats.

    Well, for the most part. But they are still cats, and still inscrutable.

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    *King gives a wonderfully detailed description of the city, and the book has some fine illustrations by Kathleen Jennings, but alas, no map. I've said this before and I'll say it again here -- every book could be made better with a map.