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
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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