How to Talk to Your Cat

George, Jean Craighead

3.82

214 ratings by Goodreads

ISBN 10: 0060279699 ISBN 13: 9780060279691

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2000

Provides early readers with a guide to cat communication by explaining the meaning behind cat expressions, cries, meows, and purrs.

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Review:

Perhaps no one is better equipped to help us understand our cats than Jean Craighead George, award-winning author of over 80 books about nature and animals. This delightful picture book for cat lovers of all ages makes it perfectly clear who has the power in a human-cat relationship: the cat. But you already knew that. What you may not have known is that cats meow as many as 19 different meows (all interpreted here), that cats never purr when they are alone, that no one knows what part of the cat a purr really comes from, and what cats' various tail positions mean. Illustrator Paul Meisel's charming, cartoonish cats prance through the pages with photos of the author herself in a clever, endearing display of the human-feline relationship. Dog lovers will want to sniff out the companion title, How to Talk to Your Dog. (Ages 7 to 107) --Karin Snelson

About the Author:

Born in Washington, D.C. and raised in a family of naturalists, Jean George has centered her life around writing and nature. She attended Pennsylvania State University, graduating with degrees in English and science. In the 1940s she was a member of the White House press corps and a reporter for the Washington Post. Ms. George, who has written over 90 books - among them My Side of the Mountain (Dutton), a 1960 Newbery Honor Book, and its sequels On the Far Side of the Mountain and Frightful's Mountain (both Dutton) - also hikes, canoes, and makes sourdough pancakes. In 1991, Ms. George became the first winner of the School Library Media Section of the New York Library Association's Knickerbocker Award for Juvenile Literature, which was presented to her for the "consistent superior quality" of her literary works.

Her inspiration for the Newbery Medal-winning Julie of the Wolves evolved from two specific events during a summer she spent studying wolves and tundra at the Arctic Research Laboratory of Barrow, Alaska: "One was a small girl walking the vast ad lonesome tundra outside of Barrow; the other was a magnificent alpha male wolf, leader of a pack in Denali National Park ... They haunted me for a year or more, as did the words of one of the scientists at the lab: 'If there ever was any doubt in my mind that a man could live with the wolves, it is gone now. The wolves are truly gentlemen, highly social and affectionate.'"

The mother of three children, Jean George is a grandmother who has joyfully red to her grandchildren since they were born. Over the years Jean George has kept 173 pets, not including dogs and cats, in her home in Chappaqua, New York. "Most of these wild animals depart in autumn, when the sun changes their behavior and they feel the urge to migrate or go off alone. While they are with us, however, they become characters in my books, articles, and stories."

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