An engrossing eye-opener on the fragility of South Africa’s fauna.
The sequel to The Elephant Whisperer (2009), which was written by Malby-Anthony’s late husband, conservationist Lawrence Anthony.
In 1998, the author and her husband founded Thula Thula, a game reserve in South Africa where they rescued a herd of elephants. But when Lawrence died unexpectedly, Malby-Anthony was faced with the formidable task of continuing their work alone, with a limited ability to speak the native language in a land where few women hold positions of authority. In this endearing and inspirational follow-up to The Elephant Whisperer—written with the assistance of Willemsen (Shepherd’s Prayer, 2012), who grew up in South Africa—Malby-Anthony shares how she not only managed to preserve their elephant herd, but went on to Phase 2 of their dream: opening a nursery for orphaned baby elephants, a hippo who didn’t like water, and rhinos whose mothers had been killed for their horns. The author shares multiple stories about her daunting mission to bring these orphaned animals back from the brink of death due to starvation, dehydration, and simple fear. She discusses the disgusting nature of poaching for horns (“they turned her beautiful face into a gruesome mess of blood and flesh, and she was alive when they did it….They butchered her while she was a breathing, living, feeling rhino”), which command incredible prices on the black market, and the extreme measures she takes in order to protect the animals in her care. Unfortunately, despite her best efforts, the game reserve was still brutally attacked. The common threads that run throughout her story are love and respect for these wild animals and the heartwarming nature of the animal families that embrace each other as well as Malby-Anthony and her dogs. The writing is full of vivid descriptions that place readers in the middle of the action, making the book difficult to put down.
An engrossing eye-opener on the fragility of South Africa’s fauna.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-22014-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
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