ANIMALS I WANT TO SEE

A philanthropist and business leader recounts a youth marked by poverty and other challenges.

Seeman grew up in a family of 14 in a housing project in Toledo, Ohio, a shoddy place where his mother stepped into a second-story hallway and nearly fell through to the floor below. It was a place where the bridge over a local roadway offered a useful metaphor: “On one side of it looms prison, despair, hunger of all sorts. On the other, freedom, pleasure, and the untold treasures that come from living a purposeful life.” He adds, “Which way will I go? Statistics say I will not choose wisely.” Allowing for a few mishaps, though, the author chose well, urged on by a wise football coach who cheered him and his teammates through losses as well as victories and by a teacher who raised difficult topics instead of “the solid kinds of questions that had unequivocal answers.” Seeman was aspirational from a young age; his title comes from a bucket list that he kept in school, quite literally enumerating animals that he wanted to see in their natural habitat. Years later, he succeeded in that goal—just in time in some cases, for the tigers he sought out in India have since been wiped out by poachers. So, too, were many of his young friends swept up by that despair and its sequelae—even as the author took every opportunity to gain an education, eventually winning a scholarship to Yale, where he continued his relentless work, “studying at the library until the last possible minute before running to make it on time to the next new experience.” His lists and life rules expanded accordingly, including one that guides him today: “Do something kind for a stranger.”

Inspirational without mawkishness, a satisfying rags-to-riches yarn.