by Peter Brazaitis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2003
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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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