tender and mournful…

Book review:

The Zookeeper’s Wife

by Diane Ackerman (b1948)

American naturalist and author

New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007

368 pages

Diane Ackerman writes about terrifying experiences, in Poland during World War II, that are not too terrible to be put into words.

Antonina is the zookeeper’s wife in Warsaw. She and her family and friends are eyewitnesses unable to escape the terror of the German invasion of Poland in 1939.

Many are killed or “transported” to the concentration camps.

Many continue to live ruined lives, in constant fear of misery, pain, and death, and with at least sporadic hope that they have a future they will welcome.

“One puzzle of daily life…was this: How do you retain a spirit of affection and humor in a crazed, homicidal, unpredictable society? Killers passed them daily on zoo grounds, death…stalked people at random in the streets.”

Ackerman writes a tender and mournful account of the instinctive courage of the children to forsake their childhood, and suffer with the adults—it’s hard to read it without tears.

The Zookeeper’s Wife may be the most emotionally burdensome book I’ve read.

* * * * * *

Book review: American Colonies

So many and so much

came before the Pilgrims

by Alan Taylor

click here

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Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,

and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)

and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”