A bright, intriguing story of people and panthers with strong appeal for readers interested in endangered species.
How Florida’s panthers were saved from extinction.
Sleek and elusive, panthers once roamed across North America, and Native people considered them spiritual beings. By the mid-1990s, in South Florida, fewer than 30 of the wild, solitary animals survived, sustained by marshes and other habitats that withstood the onslaught of suburbs, shopping centers, and other human development. Pittman (Oh, Florida!: How America's Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country, 2016, etc.) has been covering these predators—the state’s official animal—for 20 years at the Tampa Bay Times, where he is an award-winning reporter. In this lively, funny, detailed account of the Florida panther’s brush with oblivion and the madcap human efforts to rescue it, the author writes as an authority on both the animals and the uniquely Floridian men and women who have decided their fate. The humans are drawn out of Florida central casting. They include a wealthy playboy/scientist, a retired showman, a Santa Claus look-alike biochemist, and two former Detroit bootleggers. One biologist, known as “Dr. Panther,” threw things off with flawed habitat research; a wildlife biologist’s whistleblower suit corrected that. Veterinarian Melody Roelke’s use of an electro-ejaculator to collect panther semen revealed the panthers’ low genetic diversity. Drawing on dozens of interviews, Pittman weaves together stories of panther hunts, court cases, scientific rivalries, and political mischief to describe the activities of humans while panthers were being run over regularly in highway traffic. Experts argued over ways to help the cats; wildlife officials kept approving expanding development in prime panther habitat, such as the town of Ave Maria, brainchild of the founder of Domino’s Pizza. Pittman clearly traces important events, from failed efforts at captive breeding to the introduction of eight female Texas cougars to reinvigorate the panther gene pool and mitigate inbreeding problems. As a result, the panther population has grown to more than 200 today.
A bright, intriguing story of people and panthers with strong appeal for readers interested in endangered species.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-335-93880-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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