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WILDLIFE WARS

Name: WILDLIFE WARS
Author: Richard Leakey
ISBN: 0-312-20626-7

MY FIGHT TO SAVE AFRICA’S NATURAL TREASURES

by Richard Leakey & Virginia Morell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2001

The happy ending is that Leakey is on the job, albeit less than sanguine: “Kenya’s politics are rough,” understates the man...

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Combining his passion for Kenya and all that country’s living creatures—poachers excepted—with a lucid, humanistic appreciation of what both need to survive, Leakey (The Sixth Extinction, 1995, etc.) offers a vision not just for the Kenyan Wildlife Service but for the nation as a whole.

In 1989, out of the blue, Leakey was asked by President Daniel arap Moi to direct Kenya’s Wildlife Department. A noted paleontologist and discoverer of human fossil remains, Leakey had no experience in wildlife conservation, but he was just the kind of honest activist needed to clean up the corruption-rife department. Here, he thoroughly covers his days in office and the plan he developed to put the wildlife service back on an operational footing after years of mismanagement, graft, political shenanigans, and theft. Of course, he made enemies like a dead elephant attracts flies: There were the poachers and parliamentarians who benefited handsomely from the ivory trade, the real-estate interests who wanted slices of the national parks, the power mongers who didn’t like Leakey having Moi’s ear, or for using an autocratic style. But what a job he did: cutting staff members on the take and the number of poachings to a fraction, bringing in a sensible World Bank loan, developing financial autonomy within the department. Though toppled briefly by vested interests, he returned to the wildlife department and now works to end what he considers the most insidious threat of all: poverty. Biodiversity is critical, yes, but so is eating. Killing animal species will not bring prosperity, though jobs will. Yet the two—hunger and poaching—remain caught in a horrid dance kept going by corrupt officials and dealers in the expensive gimcrackery of ivory and pelts.

The happy ending is that Leakey is on the job, albeit less than sanguine: “Kenya’s politics are rough,” understates the man who has given his legs, after a suspicious plane crash, to the cause.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-312-20626-7

Page Count: 336

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | POLITICAL & ROYALTY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SIXTH EXTINCTION
by Richard Leakey & Roger Lewin

- BOOK REVIEW
THE ORIGIN OF HUMANKIND
by Richard Leakey

- BOOK REVIEW
ORIGINS RECONSIDERED
by Richard Leakey & Roger Lewin

- IN THE NEWS
Fossil Hunter Richard Leakey Has Died at 77

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)