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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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