Book Review: Cats Who Changed the World by Dan Jones

 

I already read and reviewed the dog counterpart to this book...so let's take a look at the cat version here instead!

Just like in Dogs Who Changed the World, Jones takes a look at fifty influential animals (this time cats) throughout history, myth and fiction.

I mostly like this book. It's cute, it's wholesome, it's a nice quick read if you love cats (or animals in general) and want something simple to keep you entertained. A criticism I had at the dog book was that some of the animals mentioned I don't really think really "changed the world" (e.g. influencer dogs, or pets of famous people). Sure, they have an impact on society, but changing the world sounds like something big and grand, and being a popular canine (or in this case, feline) on Instagram doesn't really do all that much especially when compared to the actually heroic historical animals featured in these books.

Another thing I found in this cat book which didn't happen in the dog book is that there's a few mistakes the author made. For example, there's a few cats which the author referred to as being tortoiseshell, but when I looked up photos of the real cats in question they were in fact not this color, but rather something like tabby or just splotched. Especially since these cats were male and everyone with a lick of cat knowledge knows that male torties are incredibly rare (and, like I said, these cats weren't even torties in real life in the first place). 

Another mistake is that the author at one point in the book wrongly attributes the creation of the fictional Cheshire Cat to C.S. Lewis, which is just plain wrong. C.S. Lewis is the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, which has no Cheshire Cat in it at all. Instead, the correct author would've been Lewis Caroll, who did create Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and, thus, the Cheshire Cat. I know that they're both famous fantasy authors who have "Lewis" and a "C"in their names, so I guess that's where the author got the two mixed up, but it's a fairly obvious mistake and really shouldn't be there. This book overall could've just used another draft before being published to prevent these mistakes. 

The rest of the book is cute, though, and the illustrations neat if not a bit simplistic. I do like this book, but because of these mistakes I do have to rank it lower than the dog book, which has (as far as I could tell) no mistakes. Maybe Jones is just more of a dog person than a cat person, who knows.

Rating: 3/5