I love some books for their wonderful writing. I love some books for their wonderful characters. I even love a few for their couldn’t-guess-that plots. But All My Patients are Under the Bed and After All They’re Only Cats keep their place on my bookshelf because of their subject. They’re about the pets we make part of their lives. In this case they’re both about cats. Dr. Louis Camuti was a veterinarian that practiced in New York during the 20th century and specialized in treating cats. This is unexpected because a) he wasn’t really a “cat person. having no cats of his own and b) he was allergic to felines. Consequently, he really had under no illusions about the species. He saw they could be good companions and he liked their assertive personalities but he knew they could be sneaky, naughty creatures as well. So All My Patients are Under the Bed is a collection of professional anecdotes Dr. Camuti collected during his years of practice. Some are well worth remembering. There were the times when he treated the cats in Tallulah Bankhead’s house (to make him completely unique, Dr. Camuti made housecalls!) and learned that however badly the actress…
Fifty-five years ago this week, a Kansas farmer, his wife and two youngest children were murdered by a pair of ex-convicts. The cons didn’t get away with much (other than the lives of their victims) and they didn’t get away for long because they were under arrest within six weeks, under sentence of within six months and under the ground within six years, executed for the crimes they’d committed. In today’s 24/7 news cycle, that story would have been buried as quickly as the principals. Instead, a fairly large group of people continue to mark this sad anniversary because Truman Capote wrote a book about the crime that set a new style and standard for writers and readers. You could say the book, In Cold Blood, was a literary event in the ’60’s that stayed popular for a number of years. For the generation who lived or grew up in Kansas in the aftermath of that book, the repercussions continued much longer My family moved first to Kansas and then to Garden City (the county seat where the defendants were tried) shortly after Hollywood released a film adaptation of Mr. Capote’s book. Because of the popularity of the book and…
I remember the summer I met her. I was in junior high, to old for kid’s books and too young (and snobbish) for the historical romances my mother favored. When I whined that I wanted something new to read, Mom looked at me thoughtfully and handed me a library book with a drawing of the English countryside on the cover. “Try this” she said.”It’s surprising.” I glanced at the title, turned to the first paragraph and was hooked with the first line,”Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” Some forty years later and I’m still hooked, returning as often as possible to the house in Cornwall called Manderly. You see, I’m obsessed with Rebecca. For Rebecca is a novel about obsession. The book began while the author, Daphne du Maurier, was living Egypt with her husband, Lt. Col. Tommy Browning and it grew out of two secret obsessions of her own: her intense homesickness for England and a packet of letters she found. The letters were from an unstable, beautiful woman Tommy had been engaged to for a short time, long before he met Daphne. Daphne and Tommy had not been married all that long when she found…
Early on in “Educating Rita” the heroine characterizes Howards End as “one crap book.” When I heard that line, I mentally crossed Howards End off my books-to-read list. Rita is a funny and engaging character so if she said the book was crap, then crap it must be. Ten years later, I saw the Merchant-Ivory film and realized I might have been hasty. More than twenty years have lapsed since then and I am still rereading Howards End, both on paper and as an e-book. It’s a best friend of a book and I can’t believe I nearly missed it. Howards End is about many things but mainly its about the connections we have, the connections we make and how they affect our lives. To begin with, two English sisters named Helen and Margaret Schlegel bump into an English family named Wilcox when they’re all on holiday in Germany. If these two upper-middle class families had stayed in England, they probably would have stayed strangers since, beyond nationality, they haven’t much in common. The Schlegels live in London and spend their time supporting progressive causes and the arts, (In American terms they would probably be called liberal elites) because they…
I like literary archetypes. To me, they’re the puzzle pieces a person can assemble to understand the canon of Western Literature. Anti-heroes, tricksters, mentors and shadows are all wonderful but my favorite is the orphan-hero. His search is for home, his judgments are his own and like all archetypes he/she morphs to reflect the values of whatever era he’s created in.** If yesterday’s Oliver Twist lives at one end of the Hero/Orphan timeline, then Tensy Farlow in Tensy Farlow & the Home for Mislaid Children resides at the other. As I said yesterday, Oliver is a sweet kid and everyone’s victim. Graceful and sympathetic beyond his circumstances, his victory is in surviving long enough to be rescued by kind adults. Well, that’s fair, given Victorian Times. Unprotected kids were nature’s victims and the best any of them could hope for is a reasonable adoption. But that’s not very heroic. Orphan heroes in today’s take charge of their own fates and everyone else’s. They’re brave, caring individuals who stand up to tyrants, tall and small, and they often rescue the adults. I realized this a few years ago when I was working on a long research paper tracing the evolution of…