Ackerman reveals other rescuers, like Dr. She introduces us to such varied figures as Lutz Heck, the duplicitous head of the Berlin zoo Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, spiritual head of the ghetto and the leaders of Zegota, the Polish organization that rescued Jews. Using Antonina's diaries, other contemporary sources and her own research in Poland, Ackerman takes us into the Warsaw ghetto and the 1943 Jewish uprising and also describes the Poles' revolt against the Nazi occupiers in 1944. ) tells the remarkable WWII story of Jan Zabinski, the director of the Warsaw Zoo, and his wife, Antonina, who, with courage and coolheaded ingenuity, sheltered 300 Jews as well as Polish resisters in their villa and in animal cages and sheds. Ackerman's evocation of a whale song shows her agile descriptive power: ""Then a trumpeting sound.surged into a two-stage grunt.followed by a stuttering lawn mower that changed from a finger being drawn across a taut balloon, then a suite of basso groans and a badly oiled garden gate creaking open."" A choice treat for both nature lovers and general readers.Ackerman ( A Natural History of the Senses
From him she learns that there are 35 known singers, and that the music is quite complex at first listen, but becomes monotonous over a season: all whales sing the same song, which evolves slowly year to year. Flying to Maul, she is the guest of Roger Payne, the world's most faithful recorder of humpback whale songs. Discovering that females have a clitoris, she asks, ""Does this mean that they can have an orgasm?"" But nobody knows-she's reached the limits of science. Augustine, where she helps determine the reptiles' sex by putting her finger in their cloaca-a cavity in which the sex organs lie. Nevertheless, they are systematically exterminated Australia's government, for example, has managed to kill 99% of their flying foxes (a large bat with a foxlike face). He explains how bats are essential in the life-histories of avocados, bananas, dates, figs, peaches, and tequila.
Ackerman jeeps across Texas's Big Bend with him as he photographs bats and speaks of such species as the tube-nosed fruit bat, whose elongated nostrils look like party favors. At her side is Merlin Turtle, founder of Bat Conservation International (""I could probably raise ten times as much money if I promised people I'd get rid of all the bats in their area.""). In a moment, 20 million bats will rise and fly to their night's feeding. Ackerman (A Natural History of the Senses, 1990, etc.) sits at dusk in Mexico at the mouth of a cave. Fresh and most likable nature essays, first seen in The New Yorker in different versions.
0 kommentar(er)
