Puss in Books

Leonardo da Vinci, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Montaigne, Catherine the Great, Horace Walpole, Samuel Johnson, Louis XV, Florence Nightingale, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Harper, Taylor Swift. Despite their prominence, these are all outliers, historically speaking, in their affinity for cats. The most widespread terrestrial carnivore in the world — and the driving force behind 90,000 YouTube uploads each day — Felis catus has been loved by some but loathed by most. “They lived solitary lives, they were more attached to places than to people, and they seemed resistant to training,” the Carleton University historian Rod Phillips writes in Cats: A History. “They were easily defined as outsiders, unsuited to human society.” Nonetheless, humans owe a debt to the house cats, street cats, and feral cats that have kept us company and, in part, kept us fed since we settled down in the Fertile Crescent some 12,000 to 15,000 years ago.

Phillips seeks to...