A pleasing gathering of distinct personalities and unique stories from the ape house.
A gorilla keeper’s memoir about her years (1982-1996) at the Columbus Zoo.
Armstrong began her career when zoos were on the cusp of rethinking their mission and their responsibilities regarding the animals in their care. It was a roiling time in the zoo community, with new ideas challenging traditional practices. Early on, the author found her niche in the zoo’s ape house, where even the simple chores gave her pleasure as they brought her close to the gorillas. In a comfortable, conversational writing style, she composes short, crisp stories about her encounters with the great apes. She eschews the chart, table, and figure approach of behavioral research, instead relying on a purely anecdotal telling of her real-life experiences with the gorillas. One of her first lessons was that keepers serve as the first advocates for the gorillas in captivity. Armstrong chronicles the processes of introducing hay for nesting and providing playthings for entertainment and structures to climb on and swing from. Today, when many zoos have created entire habitats for their apes, these elemental changes may seem negligible, but they were the first steps in fashioning suitable environments in which the apes could thrive rather than just survive. Armstrong was in the forefront of exchanging experiences with other zoos around the world, developing a network of relationships that spread advances made in gorilla husbandry and zoo management. The zoo’s philosophy became “Do the right thing for the right reasons,” guided by insights from the ape house: “Never ever presume anything; the gorillas will tell you through obvious and not so obvious ways what they want, what they need. Never bring your presumption to the fore as that will predictably get someone hurt, either a gorilla or a keeper.” Though the author’s discussions of zoo management are mostly engaging, the most heart-touching material is found in the profiles of the gorillas.
A pleasing gathering of distinct personalities and unique stories from the ape house.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8142-5571-1
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Trillium/Ohio State Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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