Gerald Durrell: The Authorized Biography
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.45 (813 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B001G7R8RY |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 644 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-04-22 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
With the authorization of Gerald Durrell's widow, Lee, and his surviving family, biographer Douglas Botting traces the life of the world-famous naturalist and popular author of over thirty-seven bestsellers. When the much-loved Gerald Durrell died aged seventy in 1995, he left behind not only his bestselling My Family and Other Animals and A Zoo in My Luggage, but also the legacy of the zoo he'd dreamed of as a small boy, where he pioneered the captive breeding of animals for conservation. Brother of the famous novelist Lawrence Durrell, the younger Durrell always saw his writings about his eccentric family in Imperial India or on the idyllic island of Corfu and his early interest in birds and beasts as the means of financing his great passion: the breeding of endangered species for their return to the wild. Like Jacques Cousteau, he traveled across the globe, bringing the exotic natural world closer to ordinary people, and presented a dozen different television documentary series on zoology, such as Catch Me a Colobus and Ark on the Move, which gave him an international audience. As he traces Durrell's growing menagerie of tapirs, angwantibo
A conservation hero K. P. Sparkman A mammoth book for an equally large individual, in bulk and spirit. Having read Durrell's first books, was equally curious about the author and was not disappointedlooked forward to each page, particularly his expeditions if not his highly personal life with his two wives. His alcohol consumption was simply sad, and even though the author states it may not have affected his work, I wonder what he would have achieved if he had not been looking forward to each drink, beginning in the morning. But he is a hero to me, and has opened up the wonders of Madagascar, and hopefully to the continuing need to . "Belgo Geordie" said This paints a portrait of a basically decent man obsessed with animals. Aged 10, I wanted to be Gerald Durrell. Very badly. OK blame it on afternoons in school reading "My Family and other Animals" and thinking why couldn't I have been born into a family so eccentrically dysfunctional and live on Corfu to boot! Let me be clear, I had no idea where Corfu was. Had seen the sea (North) mabbe enough times to count on one hand but my older brother John was a dead ringer for Lawrence (except he couldn't write) and I longed to be anywhere other than drab suet pudding island (sixties England), with a childhood other than my own. I continued to read Durrell (the animal collecti. Collectors Dreams said Loved it!. This is a Very well written and informative biography about one of my favorite authors. It's a long book and has good photographs and it brought me to tears at the end. Very highly recommended for Durrell fans.
Although his work is not widely read today, Gerald Durrell (1925-1995) was among the world's most popular naturalists in the 1950s and early '60s. Gerald Durrell, as Botting shows, went on to make signal contributions as a conservationist who founded the Jersey Zoo and other organizations devoted to protecting endangered species by breeding them in captivity and then reintroducing them into their native habitats. That passage was inspired in part by Gerald's older (and more famous) brother, the novelist and memoirist Lawrence Durrell, who gave Gerald a copy of Jean-Henri Fabre's classic Insect Life: Souvenirs of a Naturalist and encouraged his younger brother to follow his dream of living and working in the wild. In the first full-length biography devoted to Durrell, Douglas Botting writes of his passage fr