Old-fashioned stories from a time before zoos became ethical quandaries, when good-natured zookeepers loved their charges,...
City kid goes to the zoo and stays for 50 years: a charming memoir about the unaffected pleasures of a zookeeper's life.
Fresh from high school and operating on a hunch that his childhood fascination with snakes was not a fluke, Brazaitis signed on the dotted line at the Bronx Zoo to become a “broom-pushing, turtle-feeding, glass-cleaning, often terrified reptile keeper.” Thirty years later he was still in the reptile house, keeper of as many good stories as creatures. By far the greatest in number here are those featuring “animals forgoing the confines of their captivity”—staging breakouts, that is, and when you are dealing with mambas and pit vipers and king cobras (“eighteen feet in length . . . one of the most poisonous snakes in the world . . . very aggressive”), those escapes can make the heart beat stronger. The author skillfully draws unvarnished portraits of animals like Sam, the dwarf crocodile that was forever trying to sneak up behind Brazaitis and bite his bum; the Komodo Dragon that laid an affectionate paw on a photographer’s leg, inadvertently tearing it to shreds; and Mack the macaw: “I decided almost immediately to make friends with Mack. But he was evil, and my wish was delusional.” A number of these raise the question of exactly who should be in captivity, the animals or the humans who have done things like leave behind semen and feces as their calling cards in the reptile house. By the time Brazaitis moved to the Central Park Zoo as a reptile curator in 1988, he had enough of a reputation to be called on by the police (“they had two dead bodies and an apartment full of snakes and spiders”), the Drug Enforcement Agency (to handle poisonous snakes that might be used to conceal a drug shipment), and as a forensic specialist keeping an eye on the luxury exotic-leather industry.
Old-fashioned stories from a time before zoos became ethical quandaries, when good-natured zookeepers loved their charges, and maybe even vice versa. (8-photo insert, not seen)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-6012-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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
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