Henrietta was an ordinary New York City cat until she ventured overseas with foreign correspondent Christopher S. Wren and his wife and children. Over seventeen years and tens of thousands of miles, she became a plucky, indispensable companion for the reporter as he covered world events in Moscow, Cairo, Beijing, Ottawa, and Johannesburg.

Wren's often hilarious and sometimes poignant account of an American family's adventures crisscrossing the globe shows them coping with chaos in faraway places -- always with the help of their ever-resourceful feline. The result is a charming tale about a spunky, curious pet who earned the right to be ranked among the world's most widely traveled cats.

There are plenty of entertaining stories written about the public mishaps and accomplishments of dogs; they are social animals and can play highly public roles in everything from television sitcoms to real-life emergency situations. The cat, as feline admirers will not hesitate to agree, is more select in its level of tolerance for lowly humans, and thus few true stories are told that revolve around cats in public life. And then there's Henrietta.

Christopher Wren belonged to Henrietta the cat, and Christopher Wren travels far and wide in his work as a foreign news correspondent. Of course Henrietta insisted on being brought along to Moscow, Paris, Beijing, Tokyo, and all the other cities the Wrens visited. And of course Henrietta got into all sorts of scrapes--cats can cause enough trouble right in their own living rooms! The Cat Who Covered the World is a tremendously entertaining memoir and travelogue, covering 17 years in the life of a busy cat and her accommodating family. Wherever she went, she charmed, and tales of flight attendants bestowing free portions of salmon mousse and Italian taxi drivers blowing kisses into her cage while ignoring the traffic are intertwined with more typical cat stories of sudden escapes into fields, food stealing, and incessant yowling at inappropriate times. For this book, Wren sets aside his investigations and simply enjoys, culling quotes about cats from Mark Twain, Christopher Smart, Deng Xiaoping, and Herodotus for a bit of added depth. His conclusion about the cat/journalist relationship will have all feline fanciers smiling in agreement: "I have met enough celebrity journalists whose smug self-importance might have been ameliorated or corrected altogether by the ownership of a couple of cats." --Jill Lightner