From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1997:

Animal Acts:
Configuring the Human
in Western History
edited by Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior
Routledge (29 West 35th St., New York NY
10001), 1997. $17.95 paperback,
$69.95 cloth. 251 pages.

The Animal Acts introduction explains that
the purpose of the anthology is to “…configure the
human with the animal, to write zoomorphically and
anthropomorphically, to define zones of animality in
the human and zones of humanity in the animal.”
Emerging from this murk, after much more discussion
of the etymology of the word “configure,” is the
notion that we embody the best of animals, and they
embody the best of us. The rest of the book is given
over to essays describing in pompous, polysyllabic
and heavily noted detail just what this means, as
derived from literary rather than real-life sources.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1997:

Publicists regularly invade our mailbox and tie up our telephone touting
books by celebrities, usually written with substantial help from ghostwriters,
which purportedly have some sort of garbled animal protection message hidden
among drivel supposed to demonstate the celebrities’ multi-dimensionality––as if
anyone cares. We thus approached the late Sandy Dennis’ Personal Memoir
with the skepticism of an old cat toward a new dog. Dennis, however, like the
late Amanda Blake and the thriving Brigitte Bardot and Tippi Hedrun, evidently
was both sincere and so especially enthralled with cats that one or another is
mentioned on almost every page, whether or not cats are the subject of the
moment in a series of sketches that amount to a complete if brief interior autobiography.

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