A charming personal account, accompanied by nearly 100 illustrations, that underscores how owls and other birds enrich our...
Angell (Puget Sound Through An Artist’s Eye, 2010, etc.) combines his skills as a naturalist and illustrator in this chronicle of a family of screech owls that nested in the backyard of his home and became part of his extended family; it’s followed by an account of the unique characteristics of the species.
In 1969, the author and his family moved to a Seattle suburb. He built an owl nesting box strategically placed outside his bedroom window, from which to observe the owls, beginning with their extended courtship rituals in February (when the male perched on the nesting box and called to attract a female) to egg-laying in April and hatching in May. He recounts an incident when the male owl failed to heed his chicks’ begging calls for food, prompting the female to fly out of the nest and knock him off his perch in an adjoining tree. Angell accompanies anecdotes about the owls he observes with illustrations—e.g., a series of drawings showing an owl descending on prey. For more than 25 years, the family observed five different pairs of owls who nested in the box and produced about 50 young. The author gives a solid overview of the 217 species of owls. Their fossil record dates back 23 million years, and their sizes range from ounces to 10 pounds. The author attributes their success as predators to their keen hearing, which enables them to hunt in relative darkness. In one illustration, he shows a great gray owl locating a small mammal covered by a blanket of snow. Angell also reminds us that the owls he loves have been cultural icons throughout human history, famous as companions of the Greek goddess Athena and even Harry Potter.
A charming personal account, accompanied by nearly 100 illustrations, that underscores how owls and other birds enrich our lives.Pub Date: April 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-300-20344-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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