Gina Gershon

Anyone who has ever lost a beloved pet knows the horror, the angst and unremitting compulsion to search high and low and continue looking until that pet has been found and reunited with its people. Gina Gershon has been there. So have I. Her search was much more amusing than mine.

This is a funny funny book. Gershon takes the reader along on her quest to find her cat Cleo (who is a male, incidentally). She throws in some wonderful anecdotes about past pets and people in her life while show more telling stories about various people she encountered in her search for Cleo. It's a motley cast of characters and the stories are hilarious. Gershon spins her tales with a friendly familiarity. The outcome is wildly entertaining. How could it possibly be anything else when her kitty call is "HERE, KITTY, KITTY, KITTY, KITTY. HERE, CLEO. WHERE IS THE CLEO? YOU ARE NO GOOD." Do you love it or what?

I would offer one word of caution to the reader. If you, like me, laugh out loud when you read about the guy in jail or the stalker cat, just be aware of who might be watching you. Giggling in the break room at my store led several people to ask me what I found so funny. Without thinking, I held the book up so that they might see the title. One twenty-something burst out laughing. That caught the attention of one of the managers, who looked up from his lunch, read the title and did a double take. The look on his face was priceless but I don't know that he will ever get over it.

Hehehehehe...

This book was sent to me courtesy of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers Program. show less

Quite a delightful and entertaining ball of fluffiness. A blend of cat story, memoir, and venture into the paranormal. In Search of Cleo tells the story of Gina Gershon's search for her lost cat. As in most searches for lost things, the path to finding the cat goes off on numerous detours and dead ends, most of which remind the author of some episode from her past . . . which she relates. An easy read. Nice if you are looking for a diversion.

P.S. My cat did not like it when I was reading the show more book. She usually sits beside me when I read in the morning, but when I was reading this book, she got agitated and left the chair. Probably all my mental images of other cats made her jealous.

P.P.S. This book was a fun accompaniment to the "Internet Cat Video Festival" held in Minneapolis last week. You can watch the lineup of videos here: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC0B137D835A3C970

A few notes in case the publisher/editor actually sees this (the note accompanying the book said they looked forward to reading the review on LT :). I hope that the corrected version (I have "advance uncorrected proofs") will address the following:
The book uses too many different fonts & font styles! I counted at least 6, which is excessive for a book without subheadings. Sometimes quotations are in italics, sometimes in a slightly different font. The italics worked better than changing fonts, but even that got to be a bit much sometimes. In any case, the design could be simpler.

The figure quality, especially for the photos, was rather poor.
The figure captions were sometimes confusing; most of them did not identify who was who in the picture or use a standard L-to-R presentation of names.

The * (footnote indicators) didn't seem to line up with the Notes in the "Index" (a misnomer) at the back. Some of the * are missing their explanatory text.

There were quite a few typos that I hope will get "proofed" away.

When I show people the cover, they think the subtitle is the title. Perhaps that is intentional, but to me it seems unfortunate. The actually title could be more visible, without losing the play on words in the subtitle. show less

Gina Gershon is one of those women I've always loved. No idea what it is about her (beyond being gorgeous, obviously), but I've always found her fascinating.

This is a fun, light, quick read that, honestly, I wish had been a lot longer. Her stories are fun, if breezy, and mostly anecdotal rather than deep dives. I find it tragic that her best-known role is SHOWGIRLS, but it is, so much of the book does centre around that movie.

She sounds like she'd be a blast to hang out with.

I devoured this sad/hilarious/poignant/occasionally bawdy book in one afternoon. Threaded all around the central plot of the author losing her cat Cleo and mounting a long, involved search for him are fascinating stories of the L.A. characters she encounters—some of which the reader can get acquainted with even better thanks to the wonderful line drawings, growing up in her family, past relationships with men, and past relationships with cats. Many of these vignettes may defy readers' show more belief, but within the context of the story, they work—I was totally drawn in to believe in psychics, angels, reincarnation, and talking cats, which I would ordinarily be skeptical about.

Like the author, I am a "cat lady" and my relationships with cats present and pass loom large in my life. This summer, my elderly cat died, and when the author says she could swear she felt her missing cat jump on her bed and felt its four feet walking around her feet and felt the weight of a cat, I can relate to such otherworldly-seeming sensations. show less