"Just do for him what you would do with a human baby," Fred suggested.and she did. The cub's mother lost the instinct to care for him. When Bronx Zoo-keeper Fred brought home a lion cub, Helen Martini instantly embraced it. “The Human Age is a dazzling achievement: immensely readable, lively, polymathic, audacious.” -THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEWįred and Helen Martini longed for a baby, and they ended up with dozens of lion and tiger cubs! Snuggle up to this purr-fect read aloud about the Bronx Zoo's first female zoo-keeper. A beguiling, optimistic engagement with the changes affecting every part of our lives, The Human Age is a wise and beautiful book that will astound, delight and inform intelligent life for a long time to come. With her distinctive gift for making scientific discovery intelligible to the layperson, Ackerman takes us on an exhilarating journey through our new reality, introducing us to many of the people and ideas now creating-perhaps saving-our future and that of our fellow creatures. Yet we reckon with our own destructive capabilities in extraordinary acts of hope-filled creativity: we collect the DNA of vanishing species in a “frozen ark,” equip orangutans with iPads and create wearable technologies and synthetic species that might one day outsmart us. Humans have “subdued 75 percent of the land surface, concocted a wizardry of industrial and medical marvels, strung lights all across the darkness.” We tinker with nature at every opportunity we garden the planet with our preferred species of plants and animals, many of them invasive and we have even altered the climate, threatening our own extinction. In this landmark book, she confronts the unprecedented reality that one prodigiously intelligent and meddlesome creature, Homo sapiens, is now the dominant force shaping the future of planet Earth.
A quirky piece of Cold War history unlike anything you’ve heard before, The Zookeepers’ War is an epic tale of desperate rivalries, human follies, and an animal-mad city in which zookeeping became a way of continuing politics by other means.Ī New York Times Bestseller Diane Ackerman is justly celebrated for her unique insight into the natural world and our place in it.
And eventually politicians on both side of the Wall became convinced that if their zoo proved to be inferior, that would mean their country’s whole ideology was too. West German presidential candidates were talking about zoo policy on the campaign trail. Soon, state funds were being diverted toward giving these new animals lavish welcomes worthy of visiting dignitaries. So no one was terribly surprised when the head zookeepers on either side started an animal arms race-rather than stockpiling nuclear warheads, they competed to have the most pandas and hippos.
Berlin’s two zoos in East and West quickly became symbols of the divided city’s two halves. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, East Berlin and its zoo were spacious and lush, socialist utopias where everything was perfectly planned. “The liveliness of Mohnhaupt’s storytelling and the wonderful eccentricity of his subject matter make this book well worth a read.” -Star Tribune (Minneapolis) Living in West Berlin in the 1960s often felt like living in a zoo, everyone packed together behind a wall, with the world always watching. The unbelievable true story of the Cold War’s strangest proxy war, fought between the zoos on either side of the Berlin Wall.
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