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tonikayk's review
5.0
I loved this episodic book of a life well lived. What a fascinating and challenging job full of daily challenges and change. What a fabulous opportunity for a job that was "close to home". Then to be in a place where Annette's ideas were listened to and supported. My life as an accidental insurance adjuster just doesn't measure up. I really loved the diversity and wished the author was a little more exploratory at dinner, but that would be all.
marziesreads's review against another edition
4.0
I received a copy of this book from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.
3.5 Stars
Confessions of an Accidental Zoo Curator presents a series of vignette-like recollections of Annette Libeskund Berkovits's life and work with the Bronx Zoo's Wildlife Consevation Society. While it's clear that Berkovits likes animals, and certainly that she developed ground-breaking conservation education programs, I found the book oddly quite dispassionate about animals and wildlife. As a child, Berkovits was curious but afraid of animals. Her only pet had been a large bullfrog. She certainly doesn't gush about the seemingly few animals that she liked over the course of her many years at the Bronx Zoo. She seems to have enjoyed educating people about animals more than the animals themselves.
The book's shining moments are when she writes about the human animals in her life. She relates with humor and brio stories about her family, her colleagues, and some of the zoo's rather frustrating supporters or travelers. The most poignant chapter for me was the one in which a zookeeper names a baby wallaby, abandoned by its mother, after Berkovits's recently deceased father, Nachman Libeskind, who had, against long odds, survived the Holocaust and Soviet internment in a gulag. (The wallaby survived, too!) The funniest had to be the mynah bird who cursed in Yiddish.
Berkovits's love of family and education is what stuck with me more than a love of wildlife, which felt odd given the subject of the book. However, it's made me want to read her book about her father, In the Unlikliest of Places.
3.5 Stars
Confessions of an Accidental Zoo Curator presents a series of vignette-like recollections of Annette Libeskund Berkovits's life and work with the Bronx Zoo's Wildlife Consevation Society. While it's clear that Berkovits likes animals, and certainly that she developed ground-breaking conservation education programs, I found the book oddly quite dispassionate about animals and wildlife. As a child, Berkovits was curious but afraid of animals. Her only pet had been a large bullfrog. She certainly doesn't gush about the seemingly few animals that she liked over the course of her many years at the Bronx Zoo. She seems to have enjoyed educating people about animals more than the animals themselves.
The book's shining moments are when she writes about the human animals in her life. She relates with humor and brio stories about her family, her colleagues, and some of the zoo's rather frustrating supporters or travelers. The most poignant chapter for me was the one in which a zookeeper names a baby wallaby, abandoned by its mother, after Berkovits's recently deceased father, Nachman Libeskind, who had, against long odds, survived the Holocaust and Soviet internment in a gulag. (The wallaby survived, too!) The funniest had to be the mynah bird who cursed in Yiddish.
Berkovits's love of family and education is what stuck with me more than a love of wildlife, which felt odd given the subject of the book. However, it's made me want to read her book about her father, In the Unlikliest of Places.
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