Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!
My Teaser:
It should be explained at the outset that we cannot observe the killing of cats at firsthand. We can study it only through Contat’s narrative, written about twenty years after the event.
P.78, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, by Robert Darnton
The Fluff Is Raging 
Oh no. A cat Massacre. We can’t have that!
sherry @ fundinmental My TT ~ Gone Before Goodbye by Nora Leduc
LikeLiked by 1 person
no … it’s quite gruesome
LikeLike
Who could be so dastardly to massacre cats. It’s odd how we react so strongly to books or movies that depict the death or abuse of animals. I often cry over that more than over a human.
My TT – http://fuonlyknew.com/2015/01/13/teaser-tuesdays-95-growl/
LikeLiked by 1 person
I had to Google this as my first reaction was “WTF?!” The Wiki entry provides an explanation – it happened in the 1730s and because the cats were being treated better than the printer’s apprentices. “One of the apprentices imitated a cat by screaming like one for several nights, making the printer and his wife despair”…I must confess to also, on occasion, reacting more strongly to the abuse of animals than people – I guess we see them as innocents. I’m sure there have been many worse things happen to people AND animals in the years since, just less – bizarre….And in the apprentices’ mitigation(!), they held a “trial”, finding half the cats guilty of witchcraft and sentenced them to death by hanging. Bravo, Niall, I generally find Teaser Tuesday one of the less exciting memes, but this one intrigued me (trust you!) And I do hope I haven’t spoilt the ending for you lol…would love to know what the rest of the book is about; will you be reviewing it?
LikeLiked by 1 person
and for weeks they reenacted the trial … it’s a bizarre, great story, but it’s a bizarre, great book … in fact, it will make you rethink a lot about European history
LikeLiked by 1 person
Think I’ll have to seek this out – a cat trial is a whole new level of mentalness! While thinking about it, I recalled the Hartlepool monkey trial – “because they had seen neither a monkey or a Frenchman before, they concluded that the monkey was in fact a French spy”! This one’s provenance is a bit dodgy, but it’s so funny I want it to be true! I’ve just read An Officer And A Spy, another less-than-glowing moment in French legal history (at least Dreyfus was human, although a dog would probably have had better treatment…if someone pitched the story as a novel, they’d be told that it was unbelievable!)
LikeLiked by 1 person