An engaging yet heartbreaking narrative that reads like fiction.
A chronicle of a dark period for the beleaguered zoo of Mosul when a longtime denizen and family man tried to keep the animals safe during the brutal two-year occupation by the Islamic State group.
In June 2014, the Iraqi forces fled the strategic city of Mosul, “Iraq’s second city and home to over half a million people,” leaving IS to move in. Sunday Times Middle East correspondent Callaghan tells the story of the self-appointed zookeeper at the local zoo, Abu Laith, his second wife, Lumia, and their many children, who were suddenly subsumed under the laws of Sharia. This meant complying with numerous arbitrary statutes about dress and mores to which they were unaccustomed. Moreover, the animals’ cages were inexplicably moved next to Abu Laith’s house, near the park and mosque. Afraid the owner was plotting to sell them off, he needed “a spy” to keep an eye on them and help feed and care for them—especially his favorite family of lions, Mother and Father and baby Zombie, whom Abu Laith had cared for since a cub. Marwan, the young assistant, and Abu Laith went to enormous measures to try to keep the animals fed as well as safe from visitors, efforts that the author narrates capably. In brisk chapters that move back and forth among her protagonists, Callaghan also tells the story of Hakam Zarari, a former government scientist, and his family, who were horrified by the brutal methods of IS. As the liberation of the city began in late 2016, the dangers of violent death increased, as did the trauma and threat to the vulnerable, starving animals. Yet it was not Abu Laith who ultimately “saved” the animals but Egyptian-born, Austria-trained vet Dr. Amir—previously the rescuer of the Baghdad Zoo’s remaining animals—who was informed of the Mosul zoo’s lot by Hakam and swept in to help.
An engaging yet heartbreaking narrative that reads like fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-24894-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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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