The author, Thomas McNamee, is a writer of books about animals who live in the wild (e.g., bears, wolfs). As this is the only book I’ve read of his, I’m assuming from The Inner Life of Cats that his writing style is weighted toward the scholarly as opposed to the popular. Though this book is most definitely a mix of the two. For example, Chapter Two “Becoming a Cat” and Chapter Three “Thinking? Talking?”, read as if they have been written for a popular science book. Whereas, elsewhere, the book is unashamedly a love letter to Augusta, the cat he and his partner lived with and whose life runs the book’s narrative arc. This mix of popularism and science mostly works but sometimes it felt like I was reading two different books stitched together. Moreover, there’s a tension between the unashamed “cat lover” and the “scientist” as the author works through the customary set of issues that books about cats generally address. I have some trouble with Chapter Five “The Wild Animal at Large” because of the way it describes and discusses feral cats and the issues associated with them. He gets things wrong, makes incorrect assumptions, and omits key points. In the next chapter, he quotes at length Bernard Rollin without referencing him. Nonetheless, McNamee clearly likes cats and loved Augusta as it shines through the writing. His positions about cats is generally strong and correct but there are times when I think he is ill-informed and wrong. And confused or conflicted but fails to recognise this. For example, he calls for various measures to address the population of feral cats because they hunt and kill birds, mice and other animals (he buys into the flawed meta-analysis) but always set Augusta free to go outside to live out her natural instincts to, er, hunt and kills birds, mice and other animals.
The Inner Life of Cats by Thomas McNamee
The Inner Life of Cats by Thomas McNamee (2017; Hachette)

In this section:
- A Journey in Ladakh by Andrew Harvey
- A Life for Animals by Christine Townend
- About A Son by David Whitehouse
- Age of Anger by Pankaj Mishra
- All About Love by bell hooks
- Animal Ethics: the basics by Tony Milligan
- Azadi by Arundhati Roy
- Beastly by Keggie Carew
- Beef by Andrew Rimas and Evan D.G. Fraser
- Bleating Hearts by Mark Hawthorne
- Blueprint for Revolution by Srdja Popovic
- Bury the Chains by Adam Hochschild
- Call of the Cats by Andrew Bloomfield
- Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
- Empathy by Roman Krznaric
- Even Vegans Die by Carol J Adams, Patti Breitman and Virginia Messina
- Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill
- Keep Talking: A Broadcasting Life by David Dimbleby
- King Leopold’s Ghost
- Love Notes by Philip McKibbin
- Love Soup by Anna Thomas
- Makers and Manners by Andrew Holden
- Model Animal Welfare Act by Janice Cox and Sabine Lennkh
- Mortality by Christopher Hitchens
- Moti: An Indian Elephant
- Nim Chimpsky by Elizabeth Hess
- No Time to Lose by Pema Chodron
- On Editing by Helen Corner-Bryant and Kathryn Price
- On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder
- Orlando by Virginia Woolf
- Pets in America by Katherine C. Grier
- Pig Tales by Marie Darrieussecq
- Please Take Me Home by Clare Campbell
- Ruth Plant by Jenny Remfrey
- Second Nature by Jonathan Balcombe
- Story Craft by Jack Hart
- Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
- The Animal Ethics Reader and Social Creatures
- The Animals’ Vegan Manifesto by Sue Coe
- The Chernobyl Privileges by Alex Lockwood
- The Elephant Conspiracy by Peter Hain
- The End of Eddy by Edouard Louis
- The Face on Your Plate by Jeffrey Masson
- The Four Loves by C S Lewis
- The Great Cat & Dog Massacre by Hilda Kean
- The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh
- The Honor Code by Kwame Anthony Appiah
- The Inner Life of Cats by Thomas McNamee
- The Lion in the Living Room by Abigail Tucker
- The New Wild by Fred Pearce
- The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane
- The Pig in Thin Air by Alex Lockwood
- The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
- The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Scarlett & Sophie Rickard
- The Whale Warriors by Peter Heller
- The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy
- The Wildings by Nilanjana Roy
- To the River by Olivia Laing
- Topsy by Michael Daly
- Walking With Ghosts by Gabriel Byrne
- Zooicide: Seeing Cruelty, Demanding Abolition by Sue Coe and Stephen Eisenman