The Cat Who Covered The World - Hardcover

Wren, Christopher S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0753152177 ISBN 13: 9780753152171

Publisher: Isis Large Print, 2001

Synopsis

Henrietta was just an ordinary New York City cat. But seventeen years of travel, criss-crossing the globe, made her an indispensable companion for foreign correspondent Christopher S. Wren and his family as he reported on world events. In Russia, Henrietta befriended Nobel Laureate Andrei Sakharov and disrupted a diplomatic dinner to present a mouse to the guest of honour. Lost for weeks in Egypt, she survived the wild streets of Cairo and vied with the Nile River rats for scraps. When she lived in Canada she learned to plough through snowdrifts like a sled dog and she spent her twilight years in South Africa jousting with exotic birds. Wren's hilarious account shows this ever-resourceful cat helping the family cope with adventures and chaos in faraway places.

About this title

Review:

There are plenty of entertaining stories written about the public mishaps and accomplishments of dogs; they are social animals and can play highly public roles in everything from television sitcoms to real-life emergency situations. The cat, as feline admirers will not hesitate to agree, is more select in its level of tolerance for lowly humans, and thus few true stories are told that revolve around cats in public life. And then there's Henrietta.

Christopher Wren belonged to Henrietta the cat, and Christopher Wren travels far and wide in his work as a foreign news correspondent. Of course Henrietta insisted on being brought along to Moscow, Paris, Beijing, Tokyo, and all the other cities the Wrens visited. And of course Henrietta got into all sorts of scrapes--cats can cause enough trouble right in their own living rooms! The Cat Who Covered the World is a tremendously entertaining memoir and travelogue, covering 17 years in the life of a busy cat and her accommodating family. Wherever she went, she charmed, and tales of flight attendants bestowing free portions of salmon mousse and Italian taxi drivers blowing kisses into her cage while ignoring the traffic are intertwined with more typical cat stories of sudden escapes into fields, food stealing, and incessant yowling at inappropriate times. For this book, Wren sets aside his investigations and simply enjoys, culling quotes about cats from Mark Twain, Christopher Smart, Deng Xiaoping, and Herodotus for a bit of added depth. His conclusion about the cat/journalist relationship will have all feline fanciers smiling in agreement: "I have met enough celebrity journalists whose smug self-importance might have been ameliorated or corrected altogether by the ownership of a couple of cats." --Jill Lightner

About the Author:

Christopher S. Wren retired from The New York Times after nearly twenty-nine years as a reporter, foreign correspondent, and editor. He headed the Times’ news bureaus in Moscow, Cairo, Beijing, Ottawa, and Johannesburg; covered the United Nations; and reported from the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, China, Southeast Asia, Africa, South America, and Canada. He taught at Princeton University before coming to Dartmouth, where he is visiting professor in its Master of Arts program in liberal studies. He is the author of Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom.

About this edition

• Publisher: Isis Large Print
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0753152177
• ISBN 13: 9780753152171
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224