A charming memoir about birds and the people who love them.
Raffin recounts how a chance encounter with an injured dove proved to be a life-changing experience.
Fifteen years ago, the author, now a conservation columnist for the Aviculture Society of America, was a stay-at-home mom who had put her career as a Silicon Valley executive on hold in order to care for her sons. When her trainer showed up late for their appointment at the gym, he explained that he had stopped to move an injured dove to the side of the highway. Raffin went back with him to pick up the bird and take it to a veterinarian; though it eventually died, the seeds of her new vocation were planted. A newspaper advertisement led to her agreeing to take in a pet dove in need of a home, and she was hooked. More birds followed, and she became a volunteer at a local bird shelter and then a certified aviculturist, after which she joined an informal network of experts. Raffin had found her calling, opening her home to a wide variety of birds. The author describes how, over the years, she has gained expertise in housing rare, endangered species—some of which have been illegally captured in the wild—and taken on the additional task of breeding them in captivity. Not only did the learning process prove “daunting,” it also required strategic planning—finding mates, “incubating eggs, hatching them, and caring for the babies.” By 2010, Pandemonium Aviaries, which had begun on a whim (fostering birds in need of a home), was a premier conservation-breeding operation playing an important global role in saving endangered species. “I've learned that their behavior is far more fascinating than their plumage…” writes the author, “and that 'birdbrain!' is the finest of compliments.”
A charming memoir about birds and the people who love them.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61620-136-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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