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 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
