A pleasing gathering of distinct personalities and unique stories from the ape house.
A gorilla keeper’s memoir about her years (1982-1996) at the Columbus Zoo.
Armstrong began her career when zoos were on the cusp of rethinking their mission and their responsibilities regarding the animals in their care. It was a roiling time in the zoo community, with new ideas challenging traditional practices. Early on, the author found her niche in the zoo’s ape house, where even the simple chores gave her pleasure as they brought her close to the gorillas. In a comfortable, conversational writing style, she composes short, crisp stories about her encounters with the great apes. She eschews the chart, table, and figure approach of behavioral research, instead relying on a purely anecdotal telling of her real-life experiences with the gorillas. One of her first lessons was that keepers serve as the first advocates for the gorillas in captivity. Armstrong chronicles the processes of introducing hay for nesting and providing playthings for entertainment and structures to climb on and swing from. Today, when many zoos have created entire habitats for their apes, these elemental changes may seem negligible, but they were the first steps in fashioning suitable environments in which the apes could thrive rather than just survive. Armstrong was in the forefront of exchanging experiences with other zoos around the world, developing a network of relationships that spread advances made in gorilla husbandry and zoo management. The zoo’s philosophy became “Do the right thing for the right reasons,” guided by insights from the ape house: “Never ever presume anything; the gorillas will tell you through obvious and not so obvious ways what they want, what they need. Never bring your presumption to the fore as that will predictably get someone hurt, either a gorilla or a keeper.” Though the author’s discussions of zoo management are mostly engaging, the most heart-touching material is found in the profiles of the gorillas.
A pleasing gathering of distinct personalities and unique stories from the ape house.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8142-5571-1
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Trillium/Ohio State Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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