The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story PDF

Author: Diane Ackerman

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2008-09-17

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0393069354

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The New York Times bestseller now a major motion picture starring Jessica Chastain. A true story in which the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands. Jan and Antonina Zabinski were Polish Christian zookeepers horrified by Nazi racism, who managed to save over three hundred people. Yet their story has fallen between the seams of history. Drawing on Antonina’s diary and other historical sources, best-selling naturalist Diane Ackerman vividly re-creates Antonina’s life as “the zookeeper’s wife,” responsible for her own family, the zoo animals, and their “Guests”—Resistance activists and refugee Jews, many of whom Jan had smuggled from the Warsaw Ghetto. Ironically, the empty zoo cages helped to hide scores of doomed people, who were code-named after the animals whose names they occupied. Others hid in the nooks and crannies of the house itself. Jan led a cell of saboteurs, and the Zabinskis’ young son risked his life carrying food to the Guests, while also tending an eccentric array of creatures in the house. With hidden people having animal names, and pet animals having human names, it’s small wonder the zoo’s codename became “The House Under a Crazy Star.” Yet there is more to this story than a colorful cast. With her exquisite sensitivity to the natural world, Diane Ackerman explores the role of nature in both kindness and savagery, and she unravels the fascinating and disturbing obsession at the core of Nazism: both a worship of nature and its violation, as humans sought to control the genome of the entire planet.

The Zookeeper's Wife

The Zookeeper's Wife PDF

Author: Diane Ackerman

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2007-08-28

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 9780393061727

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A true story--as powerful as "Schindler's List"--in which the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands.

The Zookeeper's War

The Zookeeper's War PDF

Author: Steven Conte

Publisher: Hachette UK

Published: 2012-11-22

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1849169918

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It is 1943 and each night in a bomb shelter beneath the Berlin Zoo an Australian woman, Vera, shelters with her German husband, Axel, the zoo's director. Together, they struggle to look after the animals through the air raids and food shortages. When the zoo's staff is drafted into the army, forced labourers are sent in as replacements. At first, Vera finds the idea abhorrent, but gradually she realizes that the new workers are the zoo's only hope, and forms an unlikely bond with one of them. This is a city where a foreign accent is a constant source of suspicion, where busybodies report the names of neighbours' dinner guests to the Gestapo. As tensions mount in the closing days of the war, nothing and no one, it seems, can be trusted. The Zookeeper's War is a powerful novel of a marriage, and of a city collapsing. It confronts not only the brutality of war but the possibility of heroism - and delivers an ending that is both shocking and deeply moving.

Rush

Rush PDF

Author: Stephen Fried

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2018-09-04

Total Pages: 608

ISBN-13: 0804140073

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The monumental life of Benjamin Rush, medical pioneer and one of our most provocative and unsung Founding Fathers FINALIST FOR THE GEORGE WASHINGTON BOOK PRIZE • AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR By the time he was thirty, Dr. Benjamin Rush had signed the Declaration of Independence, edited Common Sense, toured Europe as Benjamin Franklin’s protégé, and become John Adams’s confidant, and was soon to be appointed Washington’s surgeon general. And as with the greatest Revolutionary minds, Rush was only just beginning his role in 1776 in the American experiment. As the new republic coalesced, he became a visionary writer and reformer; a medical pioneer whose insights and reforms revolutionized the treatment of mental illness; an opponent of slavery and prejudice by race, religion, or gender; an adviser to, and often the physician of, America’s first leaders; and “the American Hippocrates.” Rush reveals his singular life and towering legacy, installing him in the pantheon of our wisest and boldest Founding Fathers. Praise for Rush “Entertaining . . . Benjamin Rush has been undeservedly forgotten. In medicine . . . [and] as a political thinker, he was brilliant.”—The New Yorker “Superb . . . reminds us eloquently, abundantly, what a brilliant, original man Benjamin Rush was, and how his contributions to . . . the United States continue to bless us all.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer “Perceptive . . . [a] readable reassessment of Rush’s remarkable career.”—The Wall Street Journal “An amazing life and a fascinating book.”—CBS This Morning “Fried makes the case, in this comprehensive and fascinating biography, that renaissance man Benjamin Rush merits more attention. . . . Fried portrays Rush as a complex, flawed person and not just a list of accomplishments; . . . a testament to the authorial thoroughness and insight that will keep readers engaged until the last page.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “[An] extraordinary and underappreciated man is reinstated to his rightful place in the canon of civilizational advancement in Rush. . . . Had I read Fried’s Rush before the year’s end, it would have crowned my favorite books of 2018 . . . [a] superb biography.”—Brain Pickings

The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us

The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us PDF

Author: Diane Ackerman

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2014-09-10

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0393245845

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Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award and the PEN New England Henry David Thoreau Prize. A dazzling, inspiring tour through the ways that humans are working with nature to try to save the planet. With her celebrated blend of scientific insight, clarity, and curiosity, Diane Ackerman explores our human capacity both for destruction and for invention as we shape the future of the planet Earth. Ackerman takes us to the mind-expanding frontiers of science, exploring the fact that the "natural" and the "human" now inescapably depend on one another, drawing from "fields as diverse as evolutionary robotics…nanotechnology, 3-D printing and biomimicry" (New York Times Book Review), with probing intelligence, a clear eye, and an ever-hopeful heart.

The Zoo on the Road to Nablus

The Zoo on the Road to Nablus PDF

Author: Amelia Thomas

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 2008-01-11

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1586486586

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The last Palestinian zoo stands on a dusty, dead-end street in the once prosperous farming town of Qalqilya, on the very edge of the West Bank. The zoo's bars are rusting; peacocks wander quiet avenues shaded by broad plane trees; a teenage baboon broods in solitary confinement; walls bear the pockmarks of gunfire. And yet the zoo is an extraordinary place, with a bizarre, troubling and inspiring story to tell. At the center of this story is Dr. Sami Khader, the only zoo veterinarian in the Palestinian territories. Family man, amateur inventor, and dedicated taxidermist, he is fiercely independent, apolitical, and resourceful in times of crisis. Dr. Sami dreams of transforming the zoo into one of an international caliber. In The Zoo on the Road to Nablus, Amelia Thomas brings the reader into a world rarely glimpsed from the outside, weaving the stories of the zoo's animals, its staff, and its visitors into a rich, colorful chronicle of the indomitability of the human—and animal—spirit.

The Firemaker

The Firemaker PDF

Author: Peter May

Publisher: Quercus

Published: 2018-01-09

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 1681440881

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The first of Peter May's electrifying China Thrillers, featuring Beijing detective Li Yan and American forensic pathologist Margaret Campbell--and the explosive chemistry between them. "Stunningly original." --Scotland on Sunday "Highly recommended." --Larry Gandle, Deadly Pleasures "A fascinating look at the new China." --Kirkus Reviews A grotesquely burned corpse found in a city park is a troubling mystery for Beijing detective Li Yan. Yan, devoted to his career as a means of restoring the respect his family lost during the Cultural Revolution, needs outside help if he is to break the case. The unidentified cadaver in turn provides a welcome distraction for forensic pathologist Margaret Campbell. Campbell, married to her work and having left America and her broken past behind, throws herself into the investigation and before long uncovers a bizarre anomaly. An unlikely partnership develops between Li and Campbell as they follow the resulting lead. A fiery and volatile chemistry ignites, exposing not only their individual demons, but an even greater evil--a conspiracy that threatens their lives, as well as those of millions of others.

The Zookeepers' War

The Zookeepers' War PDF

Author: J.W. Mohnhaupt

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Published: 2020-11-10

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 150118850X

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The unbelievable true story of the Cold War’s strangest proxy war, fought between the zoos on either side of the Berlin Wall. “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. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, East Berlin and its zoo were spacious and lush, socialist utopias where everything was perfectly planned... and then rarely completed. Berlin’s two zoos in East and West quickly became symbols of the divided city’s two halves. 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. Soon, state funds were being diverted toward giving these new animals lavish welcomes worthy of visiting dignitaries. West German presidential candidates were talking about zoo policy on the campaign trail. 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. 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.

Hidden Jews in the Warsaw Zoo

Hidden Jews in the Warsaw Zoo PDF

Author: Amanda Leslie

Publisher:

Published: 2015-08

Total Pages: 22

ISBN-13: 9780996257626

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"The Holocaust Series started in the Quad Cities in 2003 with three women named Esther: Esther Avruch, Esther Katz, and Esther Schiff. Without them, there wouldn't be a book series inspiring young readers and young authors. This series includes stories of Holocaust survivors, soldiers who were eye-witnesses to the concentration camps, and Righteous Gentiles, non-Jews who risked their lives to help others"--

A Mind Apart

A Mind Apart PDF

Author: Susanne Antonetta

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2007-09-06

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9781585425181

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This beautifully written exploration of "the unusual abilities of those who are differently wired" (Psychology Today) received a Ken Book Award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness for outstanding literary contribution to the world of mental health. In this fascinating literary memoir, Susanne Antonetta draws on her personal experience as a manic-depressive, as well as interviews with people with multiple personality disorder, autism, and other neurological conditions, to form an intimate meditation on mental "disease." She traces the many capabilities-the visual consciousness of an autistic, for example, or the metaphoric consciousness of a manic-depressive-that underlie these and other mental "disabilities." A stunning portrait of how the world shapes itself in minds that are profoundly different from the norm, A Mind Apart urges readers to look beyond the concept of cures to the gifts inherent in many neuroatypical conditions. Employing a wide-ranging approach to her subject, Antonetta provides a rare glimpse into the wildly varying landscapes of human thought, perception, and emotion.