What do you think?
Rate this book
Cat Man #1
L'uomo a ventiquattro zampe. Sette vite con i gatti
Si può essere maschi, adulti, eterosessuali e innamorati alla follia dei gatti? No. E Tom ci prova a sembrare un tipo qualunque tutto pub e rock, dissimulando le sue vere tendenze: coccolare qualunque entità miagolante gli capiti a tiro. Quando incontra Dee, sua anima gemella anche in senso gattofilo, la situazione precipita. Nella loro vita entrano Janet e L'Orso, poi Brewer, Prudence e Shipley. Per non lasciarli soli Tom e Dee rimandano la luna di miele e si trasferiscono nel profondo Norfolk, a quindici chilometri dal supermercato più vicino: non ci sono pericoli, è l'ambiente ideale per i gatti. Sì, ma per gli umani? Dopo pochi mesi di godurie rurali, Tom e Dee sono sull'orlo di una crisi di nervi. E comincia una lunga serie di traslochi, uno più rocambolesco dell'altro, in cerca di una casa che metta d'accordo gatti e proprietari. "L'uomo a ventiquattro zampe" è l'esilarante e a tratti disperato resoconto di ciò che può succedere quando sei tra i gatti più carismatici, infidi, scemi e adorabili del pianeta prendono possesso della tua vita. Convincendoti ad abbandonare i comfort della vita urbana per un'esistenza nomade e disagiata, ma istruttiva: quanti sono i modi per sbarazzarsi di topi, piccioni, lucertole e altri cadaveri trovati sullo zerbino? Qual è la prima frase in lingua umana mai pronunciata da un felino? Quanto amore e morte, quanta depressione, isteria e peli volanti può sopportare un uomo prima di porsi la fatidica domanda: il mio gatto è un genio del male?
246 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
45 people are currently reading
1286 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 173 reviews
April 29, 2017
You think you're cat mad?
Read this book,then volunteer in our cat shelter 😄
Read this book,then volunteer in our cat shelter 😄
July 1, 2019
Join Tom Cox and his partner Dee as they navigate first the hyperative and overdemanding roads of London, followed by numerous moves to different areas of Norfolk where they believe they have found their dream home - oh, and there are numerous cats to be entertained, saved, fed, cleaned and loved along the way. My favourite is always going to be 'The Bear' who looks constantly bemused and melancholic due to his shocking start at life (abandoned on the motorway in a plastic bag, had his ear torn, had a hole ripped in his throat and lost countless patches of his fur as well as suffering from rather bad asthma). He is the cat who would kick off the popular meme 'why my cat is sad' and there is no other cat that you can match in intellect or superhuman mystique. He's very hard to work out, sometimes playing the part of an adorable and loveable rogue that allows you to tickle his tummy, and the other times he fixes you with his unblinking gimlet eye and judges you for everything you may or may not have done. Tom has a lovely way of writing, and it's clear he adores not just his own cats, but any cats he happens to see outside his house. He is indeed a 'cat man.'
May 2, 2012
I tried. I really did. I wanted to love it because it was supposed to be all about cats and living first hand with their quirkiness and I love cats and have lived with their quirkiness for half of my life. Unfortunately, I found the book somewhat boring and a little forced. I'm about 70% of the way through but I can't bring myself to finish it. Bought it on a whim when I was browsing through Amazon, but it's really one to get from the library if you want to check it out. Not that I recommend it.
July 23, 2009
Friends who know my fondness for the tales of Dewey the library cat and Christian the lion will not be at all surprised to learn that I loved Tom Cox' "Under The Paw."
Cox, a former music critic, writes a moving and entertaining story about the various cats who have entered his life. He is an unrepentant feline lover, and is unafraid to tell potentially embarrassing tales on himself in this memoir.
Among my favorite parts of the book are the various definitions for cat behavior, and the hilarious instructions for the catsitter.
Not to be missed by animal lovers.
Cox, a former music critic, writes a moving and entertaining story about the various cats who have entered his life. He is an unrepentant feline lover, and is unafraid to tell potentially embarrassing tales on himself in this memoir.
Among my favorite parts of the book are the various definitions for cat behavior, and the hilarious instructions for the catsitter.
Not to be missed by animal lovers.
July 29, 2017
I have mixed feelings about this book. While I am sure the author did love his six cats and I enjoyed reading about them, my own indoor only attitude contradicts the author's free roaming cat approach. I was upset by the injuries and ailments the cats incurred due to this free roaming lifestyle.
June 12, 2016
I'm sorry, much as a) I am a cat man to ( long story, but when I moved to France, I went to get a maximum of 2 cats from a French farmer and came back wit 4 and was known in my village as the mad Englishman with 4 cats ) and b) I did laugh out loud on a few occasions whilst reading the book, I'm only giving it 4 (3.5 really) stars. I just got lost from about half way to 3/4 of the way through. Yes of course I finished it, and laughed aloud at least once more, but I was aware I'd drifted off for 40 or 50 pages, and so it's only 4 stars.
October 23, 2013
Tom Cox is a self-confessed "mad cat man", and this book is a memoir of (secondarily) his life and (primarily) the cats in it.
He skips fairly briefly over his childhood, and childhood cat. He skims likewise over the couple of years he spent being a rock journalist in London, years apparently most notable for freaking his friends out by making up to every cat he encountered on the street. He then meets a nice young lady who shares his feline fixation, and they settle down in the bulk of the book to keep cats, and move house rather frequently.
Mr. Cox is not as funny a writer as Doreen Tovey (but then, nobody is), but he's a massive improvement on the author of the mawkish book about the library cat. There are plenty of laugh-out-loud funny bits and a pleasing lack of sentimentality. Really, I think the only thing the book is missing is decent pictures of the cats.
He skips fairly briefly over his childhood, and childhood cat. He skims likewise over the couple of years he spent being a rock journalist in London, years apparently most notable for freaking his friends out by making up to every cat he encountered on the street. He then meets a nice young lady who shares his feline fixation, and they settle down in the bulk of the book to keep cats, and move house rather frequently.
Mr. Cox is not as funny a writer as Doreen Tovey (but then, nobody is), but he's a massive improvement on the author of the mawkish book about the library cat. There are plenty of laugh-out-loud funny bits and a pleasing lack of sentimentality. Really, I think the only thing the book is missing is decent pictures of the cats.
August 19, 2011
The best thing I can say about this book is that it is only 240 pages long. That being said, it was a LONG 240 pages and I had to take a break from this book for a while or risk never finishing it. I am a cat person and I normally love cat based books. I follow the author on facebook and his blog and have enjoyed both, so I thought I'd like this book. I even had to make a point of buying the book out of country as it isn't printed in the US. But alas this wasn't my cup of tea. I've read plenty of British books and been fine but I think it was too British for me when it came to having to figure out slang I've never head of. I also really don't enjoy reading about repeated instances of cats peeing and vomiting all over the place. There was some interesting bits, such as a cat that hissed when it was happy and purred when it was angry, as well as bits that were quite funny at the end of each chapter. Those really were what saved this from a one star rating from me.
February 24, 2020
This book was what I thought Talk to the Tail: Adventures in Cat Ownership and Beyond would be: all-cat, an intro to the author's cats and life, all that jazz. Yes, it was fully my fault that I didn't look up which one came first (I hadn't realized they were sort of a "series"), and that I didn't stop reading Talk to the Tail when I did find out. That fact didn't play any role in my rating.
The rating is the same as Talk to the Tail, because, while Under the Paw was the all-cat memoir I was looking for, Talk to the Tail was a lot funnier, and both books don't have much re-readability merit (which is very important for me; a high rating means a book I want to revisit multiple times). They were fun while they lasted but I don't think I'll be revisiting them anytime soon.
The rating is the same as Talk to the Tail, because, while Under the Paw was the all-cat memoir I was looking for, Talk to the Tail was a lot funnier, and both books don't have much re-readability merit (which is very important for me; a high rating means a book I want to revisit multiple times). They were fun while they lasted but I don't think I'll be revisiting them anytime soon.
February 1, 2015
Tom Cox really knows cats and this charming memoir gave me a great deal of pleasure. I could recognise many of my own feline tribe. Even though I now only have three there was a time when my late husband and I had nine cars so could well appreciate the joys and challenges of having a houseful of feline companions.
May 6, 2013
Just not my kettle of fish - just couldn't get on with his style and gave up after about p.45.
November 14, 2017
Rambling and awful. I love animal books with interesting stories, this was boring and waffly
May 8, 2019
Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Manby Tom Cox is part memoir and part Ode to a Cat. A biography of sorts told through the author's history of befriending moggies, we get to know Tom as he introduces us to the felines in his life. The Audiobook version that I listened to was provided by the RNIB and is narrated by Mark Meadows, who also gives voice to another cat-themed book by Tom Cox;
The Good, the Bad, and the Furry
, which is available on Audible.
As Tom's feline timeline progresses, he supplies vivid descriptions of each of his cats' characters, the way one might reminisce about a dearly-departed relative. (Though hopefully nobody reading this shipped their incontinent grandmother off to The Farm at the End of the Universe upon the arrival of their first child.) This familial fondness will come as no surprise to anyone who has found themselves owned by a cat or two in their lifetime, but we seldom get to hear about anyone else's in such detail.
Whether discussing a childhood pet or the shared-ownership of a then-girlfriend's cat, each animal has as much personality as any of history's most eulogised characters, and it does not seem at all strange that there is almost more in these books about the cats themselves than there is about their impact upon the lives of the humans they adopt. Tom Cox anthropomorphises his cats to such an extent that, when I had to stop the book halfway-through and couldn't return to it until 24hrs later, it took me several minutes to remember that Rory - the angry, white-van-man character who seemed ready to Hulk-out at any moment - was actually Tom's builder and not one of the cats.
Mark Meadows narrates the book superbly. I was initially a little disappointed to see that Tom did not narrate this one himself, given how much I enjoyed his reading of 21st Century Yokel , but that passed swiftly once I realised that it was Meadows instead. His soothing, friendly voice helps make this audiobook equally amusing, comforting, and charming in turn, and he does just as well reading this book as he did with The Humans by Matt Haig , which I also loved.
I would recommend this book to anyone who has ever been fortunate enough to be befriended by a cat, and anyone who enjoys Cox's other musings. Whilst the landscape does not feature to quite the same extent in this book as his more recent offerings, and I didn't have to keep adjusting the volume to accommodate his father's shouting, it does have the same sincerity and appreciation for the natural world and all the marvellous creatures in it. By the end, I felt like I knew Tom far better, and it was nice to reflect upon the animals which have shared - and helped to shape - my own life, too.
If you liked this review then please join me for more!
| Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram |
As Tom's feline timeline progresses, he supplies vivid descriptions of each of his cats' characters, the way one might reminisce about a dearly-departed relative. (Though hopefully nobody reading this shipped their incontinent grandmother off to The Farm at the End of the Universe upon the arrival of their first child.) This familial fondness will come as no surprise to anyone who has found themselves owned by a cat or two in their lifetime, but we seldom get to hear about anyone else's in such detail.
Whether discussing a childhood pet or the shared-ownership of a then-girlfriend's cat, each animal has as much personality as any of history's most eulogised characters, and it does not seem at all strange that there is almost more in these books about the cats themselves than there is about their impact upon the lives of the humans they adopt. Tom Cox anthropomorphises his cats to such an extent that, when I had to stop the book halfway-through and couldn't return to it until 24hrs later, it took me several minutes to remember that Rory - the angry, white-van-man character who seemed ready to Hulk-out at any moment - was actually Tom's builder and not one of the cats.
Mark Meadows narrates the book superbly. I was initially a little disappointed to see that Tom did not narrate this one himself, given how much I enjoyed his reading of 21st Century Yokel , but that passed swiftly once I realised that it was Meadows instead. His soothing, friendly voice helps make this audiobook equally amusing, comforting, and charming in turn, and he does just as well reading this book as he did with The Humans by Matt Haig , which I also loved.
I would recommend this book to anyone who has ever been fortunate enough to be befriended by a cat, and anyone who enjoys Cox's other musings. Whilst the landscape does not feature to quite the same extent in this book as his more recent offerings, and I didn't have to keep adjusting the volume to accommodate his father's shouting, it does have the same sincerity and appreciation for the natural world and all the marvellous creatures in it. By the end, I felt like I knew Tom far better, and it was nice to reflect upon the animals which have shared - and helped to shape - my own life, too.
If you liked this review then please join me for more!
| Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram |
September 30, 2022
This was disappointing. I absolutely love cats, they take up the majority of my time on the internet and my own fur child is snoozing beside me as I type. With that in mind, I should have been the perfect audience for this book but it felt like it was trying way too hard. The writing felt choppy and loose. I lost interest very quickly and found myself skim reading large parts. I couldn't muster up any enthusiasm at all.
So from me and Sybil (aforementioned fur child) it's a firm no.
So from me and Sybil (aforementioned fur child) it's a firm no.
December 24, 2022
Humorous book about a man's obsession with cats, as a cat owner much of this is relatable
December 2, 2014
A fun, well written book about Tom and the way cats have shaped his life. I love the funny, upbeat tone to most of the stories. The imagery in the writing is incredibly good, and I laughed a lot. Most cat owners will relate, especially to the dictionary parts about cat terms. I can say with all honesty that most of my kitchen is covered in 'gribbly bits', mainly from Whiskas meat varieties (no poultry, for some reason Ivan throws up all poultry based wet foods).
I like the 'My Cat is Sad' posts on Facebook a lot, but this has been on my too read shelf even longer. Glad to finally have a copy, and I'll have to hunt down the rest of his books after Christmas. Until then, I am banned from buying books in case someone buys me the same book for Christmas.
If you enjoy cat tales, and just love cats in general, then this is the book for you. I know a lot of animal lovers won't pick up a book where an animal dies, and yes, one cat passes away during the course of the book, so there's your warning. I still think it's a five star book, and I enjoyed it very much!
I like the 'My Cat is Sad' posts on Facebook a lot, but this has been on my too read shelf even longer. Glad to finally have a copy, and I'll have to hunt down the rest of his books after Christmas. Until then, I am banned from buying books in case someone buys me the same book for Christmas.
If you enjoy cat tales, and just love cats in general, then this is the book for you. I know a lot of animal lovers won't pick up a book where an animal dies, and yes, one cat passes away during the course of the book, so there's your warning. I still think it's a five star book, and I enjoyed it very much!
August 4, 2011
Keen animal lovers, especially of the feline type, will identify their whiskers-brushed experiences in the detailed & highly humorous accounts by Tom Cox. It is extremely evident that Cox has ample writing experience: he used to review music albums for news articles. His extensive knowledge on music, house-hunting, a fluid and pleasant sense of writing, his furry companions, his positive and humorous personality, and the diligent company of his sweet partner make this book a delectable and enjoyable British mix. It would undeniably loosen any stiff upper lip.
February 27, 2021
A year or two ago, my mother rather solemnly handed me this book and told me "Read this and find out if it's worth reading."
Well mother, I can now say, without any hesitation or doubt - it is NOT.
I wanted to at least find the writing funny, or the antics of the cats adorable. It was not and they were not. This book was a chore to get through, though, thankfully, it is short and I finished it in under a day.
Still. I can't get those hours back.
Well mother, I can now say, without any hesitation or doubt - it is NOT.
I wanted to at least find the writing funny, or the antics of the cats adorable. It was not and they were not. This book was a chore to get through, though, thankfully, it is short and I finished it in under a day.
Still. I can't get those hours back.
August 4, 2017
Loved this book - a lack of over-sentimentality that seems to plague some memoirs about cats, and so many funny and heartbreaking moments too. I recommend it, especially if you're a cat lover and have cats of your own.
April 21, 2009
And I thought I was cat-mad!
March 19, 2016
Easy reading and if you like cats it is interesting . The author knows cats very well indeed.
December 15, 2015
A funny and affectionate look at a few of the cats that have entered Cox's life.
September 19, 2018
Having owned four cats (three still currently with us) how can I not be tempted to pick up a book by a sell confessed cat lover. There was a lot to like about this book, he doesn't try to imply that his cats are special (as I've read in other books) they are just ordinary cats with different personalities, and I loved his descriptions of all of them. He reminded me of mu hubby at times, all bravado and denial in front of friends but a big softy with the cats when at home. He talked a lot about taking pictures of his various cats and yet the book was missing them, I would have loved to put a face to the descriptions.
November 10, 2023
Not sure when I read the two books from this author as I read on my KOBO and it doesn’t report to Goodreads, but it was within the last month.
This one is funny. I read them in reverse order and didn’t have high hopes for this one, but did laugh out loud a couple of times and have lived some of the experiences that made it even funnier.
This one is funny. I read them in reverse order and didn’t have high hopes for this one, but did laugh out loud a couple of times and have lived some of the experiences that made it even funnier.
November 28, 2019
While I did enjoy the cat anecdotes, the writer seemed to think he was the only cat interested person on the planet and yet seemed insecure enough in this identity to constantly feel the need to bring up all the"crazy" things he didn't do (such as refer to himself as his cats' dad - oh noo!!!)
June 4, 2021
Cox has always loved cats and was lucky enough to find a wife who was the same. In this book he recounts their life together with their felines. It's full of humour and very identifiable for those who share their homes with tiny furry overlords.
January 21, 2025
A lovely read! Made me laugh and also cry as I couldn't help but remember all the moggies who've been in my life (and the few who still are).
[Twinkle, Ginger, Candice, Fluffy, Tigerlily, Tiny, Ling, Route, Maya, Rak'n, Puzzle, Salvador, Door Bell, Wilfred, Chernobyl.]
I'm more familiar with Tom's more recent work, so it's great to see some of their 'seeds' in this book! Obviously anyone who likes cats should read this. Even if you don't, you should give it a go.
[Twinkle, Ginger, Candice, Fluffy, Tigerlily, Tiny, Ling, Route, Maya, Rak'n, Puzzle, Salvador, Door Bell, Wilfred, Chernobyl.]
I'm more familiar with Tom's more recent work, so it's great to see some of their 'seeds' in this book! Obviously anyone who likes cats should read this. Even if you don't, you should give it a go.
January 14, 2019
Lively, engaging, well written...
July 15, 2025
a jocular account of life with a house full of cats; how they change the demographics of your lifestyle and ambitions.
March 20, 2018
Well, 3 and 1/2 stars. I enjoyed The Good, The Bad, and the Furry better, and having read that first, I think it spoiled this book a bit. But it is quite funny and touching.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 173 reviews