Creature Comforts: The Adventures of a City Vet

by Stephen Kritsick, Patti Goldstein

A memoir by a New York City veterinarian.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir

250 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1983

Reviews

[Stephanie A.]

I picked this up randomly at a book sale a few years ago, because I'm generally fond of vet memoirs from any era. I wasn't yet born when it was published and the name didn't ring a bell, but the jacket indicated that he was "known to many as Dr. Steve" due to his "regular appearances on New York's 'Romper Room' and as a feature contributor to CNN's 'People and Pets,'" and that his "experiences and sensibilities may well establish him as America's Herriot."

Between that and the sharp-jawed, great-haired photo on the back, in which he's even holding up a pair of puppies, one gets the sense that he was -- or at least thought of himself as -- a real hotshot back in the day. The text, which includes quite a few references to dating, women coming on to him, and at least one suggestion that "Steve Stunning" could have had a great career in gynecology, seems to bear this out.

So I was NOT expecting, when I paused after chapter 3 to ask the internet what he was up to these days and why I hadn't heard of this hotshot TV vet, to find out..."OH! What??"

"Steve Kritsick, ABC's expert vet, dead at 42 of AIDS"

In 1994, barely a decade after this book's release. 😲 In retrospect, that really, really makes the chapter where his lifelong best friend died of cancer at 27, and gave him a reckoning about his own mortality, hit hard.

(It also makes the emphasis on women even wilder, because his brief obituary made only oblique reference to being survived by "his companion, Art Campbell." This made me VERY curious, but more on this at the end.)

Anyway, back to the actual book...

Despite all those preconceived judgments, between having my perception of his life reset and the reading experience itself, I had a really fun time! Given the close ratio of personal life to animal treatment cases, I still thought this was going to turn out more on the low end of 3 stars, but it is a solid 4 -- co-author Patti Goldstein must have been instrumental in putting the shine on. I was engaged from beginning to end, everything moving along at an excellent clip.

The cases, of course, are the best part -- the intensity of an overnight emergency animal clinic is as vivid as any episode of ER -- but the people and scenes of the city itself somehow become just as entertaining to read about. (I could FEEL that air-condition-lacking studio apartment on the Upper East Side... and I can only dream about the still-small but nicer and antique-furbished apartment he moved into after that). Some of the stories take place at other clinics he worked at, and those were honestly just as interesting as the emergency room.

I loved reading about his connection with older vet & mentor, Emily. Nurse Penny? I wanna be her best friend. And I'm almost ashamed of how funny I found his never-ending hatred for one particularly incompetent intern (did he agree to this book entirely so that he could have the last word in this vendetta), to the point of wrapping up the book with a story of the time that little brown-nosed tattletale bitch (he didn't use those exact words but it was clear in the tone) got his far superior colleague fired. Kritsick is like two steps away from convincing me that if he had mob connections, he would have used them to put this guy in the East River.

Honestly, my first thought upon closing it was frustration that I couldn't go immediately look up what all of the staff members referenced got up to. (At least, I assume he used pseudonyms for everybody, given how frankly some of them are described...)

I was still hoping to learn more about the scope of HIS career, though, which took a surprising bit of effort to turn up anything beyond obituaries. I was trying to find clips of his TV appearances, but I ended up finding this rather interesting segment from an episode of In The Life, starting around 14:48, filmed not long before his death, which addresses some of my questions about his personal life.

I also managed to turn up one (1) thread on...Threads...from his niece, a very recent one at that, which is a lovely tribute to his memory complete with a couple of photos. I don't have a Threads account, but her post is much appreciated by this reader. And that was before I got to the tantalizing comment about her own unpublished memoir...

In conclusion: you know it's a good book when I start doing homework about it.