Cat Speak: How to Communicate With Cats by Learning Their Secret Language

Rating:
Summary: Useful for people in certain situations.
Review: This book is probably extremely helpful for people in a few categories. It would be quite helpful to someone who wants to train a cat for show business or for cat shows; it would also be extremely helpful to someone who has never been around cats, someone who has been around cats but doesn't really understand them, someone who wants to learn basics about different cat breeds, or someone who is going to be living with a cat for the first time.
I had lived with cats before by the time I read this book, and I found most of the provided information to be fairly obvious. Feline body language, for instance, is one topic covered by the text. There were some bits that were interesting and/or surprising to me, though. For example, there is a short section on chattering. My present cat does sometimes chatter, but previous cats I'd known never did, so this topic was new for me.
The portion of the book about cat selection was not all that insightful, to my mind. If I did want to adopt a purebred cat, I'd want to research breeds in more depth than the book offered; but my cat came from a shelter, and I felt like the only advice the author had that applied to "impure" breeds was to make sure that the individual cat to be adopted was healthy and well-adjusted.
If you're looking for basics on cats, breed selection, cat training, and/or cat mannerisms, this book is an excellent choice for you. If you're already familiar with cat behavior and have no interest in extensive training, however, the book won't tell you much that you need to know.