The Tiger in the House
Description:... The enormously erudite and unfailingly charming Carl Van Vechten sings the praises of the most enigmatic of human companions in this witty, learned, and unabashedly opinionated book, one of the most enjoyable and wide-ranging of literary reckonings with the animal world. Carl Van Vechten was an esteemed photographer, novelist, and critic, a champion of modernism and the Harlem renaissance. His deepest devotion, however, was to the feline, an animal who, as he writes, “has been a god, a companion of sorceresses at the Witches’ Sabbath, a beast who is royal in Siam, who in Japan is called ‘the tiger who eats from the hand,’ the adored of Mohammed, Laura’s rival with Petrarch, the friend of Richelieu’s idle moments, the favorite of poet and prelates.” All cat haters are here served notice to beware. The Tiger in the Houseis an unparalleled paean to the quirks and qualities of the cat. To it, Van Vechten brings a remarkable expertise in every kind of human endeavor: science, literature, art, history, law, music, and folklore from around the world, not to mention the most important thing of all–his personal experience of his own beloved cats.
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