Nonfiction Review: The Zookeeper's Wife

Way back in 2007 when The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman was first released, I heard scores of rave reviews, so I added it to my want-to-read list (a very long list). Fast-forward to 2022 when I was visiting Little Free Libraries in my town--supposed to be just dropping off--and I spotted the book and snatched it up. I finally read it last month for Nonfiction November. Wow, what a stunning book! It was definitely worth the wait.

The book opens in 1935 in Poland, describing the beautiful world of the Warsaw Zoo, run by husband and wife Jan and Antonina Zabinski. Their zoo was filled with unique and fascinating animals in realistic habitats, with a large collection of exotic birds, reptiles and amphibians, animals from around the world, and animals unique to their region, like the European bison (I never knew there was such a thing!) and Przywalski horses. Their large, modern house on the premises was filled with a strange menagerie of baby or injured animals being nursed back to health, many of whom became family pets, beloved by their young son, Ryszard. It was a peaceful, harmonious, lovely place. Then in 1939, they woke one morning to the sounds of German warplanes, followed by weeks of bombs directly hitting the city--and the zoo--and soon, the Nazis marching in to invade in September 1939. The Nazis walled off a Jewish ghetto and began their process of restricting, then later ending their lives. The animals still left in the zoo, those not killed or run off by the bombing, were taken by a colleague of theirs, a German zookeeper they had previously been friends with and with whom they enjoyed discussing zoology during annual professional meetings. He assured them he was talking their most valuable animals back to Germany "to keep them safe." With few animals left, and Jan involved in the underground resistance, they used their connection with the German zookeeper, up high in the Nazi organization, to repurpose the zoo several times during the war, as a placed to raise animals for fur for the German armies and other uses. With Germans coming and going freely from their zoo and home, they also brazenly used their property to hide and save hundreds of Jews during the war, putting their own lives at risk.

This remarkable true story is told in a very effective way. The author used many primary sources, including Antonina's own diaries kept throughout the war, and the effect is to make you feel like you are right in the middle of what is happening. It is horrifying, shocking, and inspiring as the Zabinskis and their "guests" struggle with starvation, despair, and satisfying basic needs while never losing hope. They not only kept all those people safe but created a temporary home for them, filled with art, music, and conversation, all right under the noses of the Nazis. My husband was teasing me as I read this book because I kept reaching for my iPad while reading the book, to look up all kinds of fascinating details: animals I'd never heard of, sculptures and artwork created by their guests, real photos and videos of the Nazi invasion and all that came after it. To me, that is the best kind of nonfiction book: the kind that is fascinating and helps you learn a lot but also makes you want to know even more. Both the subject matter here and the way the story is told make for an engrossing, captivating book, which also includes photos. I'm so glad to have finally read it.

368 pages (but the text ends on page 323, with lots of extra details at the end), W.W. Norton & Company

Blackstone Audio

I just discovered this book was adapted into a movie that we definitely want to watch!

This book fits in the following 2023 Reading Challenges:

 

Mount TBR Challenge

Monthly Motif - Around or Out of this World - Poland

Alphabet Soup Challenge - I got a Z!

Nonfiction Reader Challenge - Science (zoology)

Diversity Challenge

Travel the World in Books - Poland

 

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Listen to a sample of the audiobook here and/or download it from Audible.

 

Or get this audiobook from Libro.fm and support local bookstores (audio sample here, too).

 

Print and e-book from Amazon.

 

You can buy the book through Bookshop.org, where your purchase will support the indie bookstore of your choice (or all indie bookstores)--the convenience of shopping online while still buying local!

 

It's Monday 12/4! What Are You Reading?

Hosted by The Book Date

Life

Why does time seem to speed up just when you need more of it? That's how it always feels at this time of year, when I realize that I once again did not get an early start on all of my holiday to-do's! So, last week was mostly the annual rush to get things done. I scrambled to do my shopping on Cyber Monday (and beyond); because of my illness and this continuing relapse, I do almost all of my shopping online. I got most of it done last week, with just two more people to buy for and a stop at my local indie bookstore this week (my one in-person stop) to order books. Books make the best gifts! I've also been rushing to upload photos from the year to Snapfish, so I can make/order the annual photo books, calendars, and ornaments. And I updated my address list and printed labels this weekend, though we haven't yet started signing and mailing cards.

I am still spending most of my time on the couch, though we did get a few days where the temperature hit 50 (or close enough), so I am trying to enjoy every minute on the back deck that I can!

Might have been pushing the weather but the sun was out!

My view from the deck

I did get out for one very short walk!

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On the Blog

 Two Great Teen/YA Graphic Memoirs - I reviewed two graphic memoirs, Layers by Pénélope Bagieu, a coming-of age memoir told in sixteen stories, and Dreamer: Growing Up Black in the World of Hockey by Akim Aliu, about racism in both youth and pro hockey and what the author is doing to improve things for today's kids. 

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On Video

Friday Reads 12-1-23 - my brief weekly update on what I am currently reading, as last week I finished up my Nonfiction November books.

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 What We're Reading

 

 

I finished We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby, a collection of essays, for my last Nonfiction November book. I've been hearing about Irby for years, and my husband gave me this one for my birthday. She doesn't pull any punches! Her essays are honest, poignant, and funny. Some are on topics I can't really relate to, like dating in the modern world, but other topics are universal. And I was surprised to learn that she also has a chronic immune disorder, Crohn's. It's not a focus of her writing here, but as with any chronic illness, it's an integral part of her life, so it affects everything. She can be very blunt, especially when it comes to bodily functions and sexual encounters! I enjoyed the wide range of essays here.

 

 

On audio, I finished listening to The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World by Melinda Gates. It''s all about her charitable work, focused on improving the lives of girls and women, here in the U.S. and around the world, with a special focus on availability of birth control and education, two aspects that she learned had a profound effect on women and on their communities. She includes lots of stories about girls and women all over the world (which are pretty eye-opening), as well as data and research and how her foundation tries to help, plus her own personal stories. It's a fascinating and inspiring book.

 

 

And by the time I finished those, it was already Friday, and my book group meets this Thursday to discuss Homecoming by Kate Morton, which is over 500 pages! I doubled up and got both the print book and the audio from the library to help me read faster. I haven't read a Morton novel since The Forgotten Garden in 2011, and this novel has a similar structure, alternating between different characters and timelines to weave together a full story. Here, on Christmas Eve 1958 in Australia, a mother and her four children are found dead at a riverside picnic, and in 2018, a woman in London rushes home to Australia when her beloved grandmother is hospitalized. Family secrets and mysteries are slowly revealed. I was a bit confused at the beginning, but now things are starting to come together, and I'm engrossed in the story. Wish me luck in finishing by Thursday!

 

 

 My husband, Ken, is still reading Holly by Stephen King, a new novel featuring the character Holly Gibney. She's working for the Finders Keepers detective agency that she and Bill Hodges started and working on a strange case of multiple disappearances in a small midwestern town. I love what King said about Holly, that she was supposed to be a minor walk-on character in Mr. Mercedes, but he couldn't get her out of his mind. She also appeared in Finders Keepers and End of Watch (the Bill Hodges trilogy), plus The Outsider, and now she has her own book. I can't wait to read it myself!

 

 

Our son, 29, finished reading Brandon Sanderson's just-published The Sunlit Man, which takes place in the Cosmere universe my son loved in the Mistborn series. For his birthday last year, I signed him up for Sanderson's big Kickstarter, and this was the fourth book he received. It's a gorgeous embossed hardcover, and he said it was phenomenal!! Now's he's moved onto another Sanderson novel, The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England, which was the second of the "secret project" Kickstarter books that he wrote during the pandemic. This one sounds like fun!

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What Are You Reading Monday is hosted by Kathryn at Book Date, so head over and check out her blog and join the Monday fun! You can also participate in a kid/teen/YA version hosted by Unleashing Readers.

You can follow me on Twitter at @SueBookByBook or on Facebook on my blog's page.  

What are you and your family reading this week? 

 

Two Great Teen/YA Graphic Memoirs

I took advantage of Nonfiction November to  catch up on some graphic memoirs, and I read two of them that are perfect for teens and young adults (though I enjoyed them as an adult, too!).

Pénélope Bagieu has written and illustrated several graphic novels and graphic nonfiction books, including the award-winning Brazen, though her coming-of-age graphic memoir, Layers, was the first of her books I've read. I'm so glad I did! In it, she tells sixteen different stories about her life in France, covering the period from childhood to young adulthood, with warmth, emotional depth, and humor. Each of these is a separate vignette, not in chronological order, on a different topic, but together they paint a full picture of her early life and process of growing into an adult. Her first story is titled, Why Don't You Have a Cat?, and it tells the story of the kittens she and her sister got for Christmas when she was very young. But she had her cat for almost twenty years, and she tells stories of her relationship with her cat throughout those years, so we see every stage of her life through that lens, from small child to young adult. Some vignettes are very short and funny, like A Story About My Seduction Abilities, or short and dark, like the one-page story about noticing signs that a friend in school was being abused. Sometimes she digs a bit deeper into some serious topics, as in Deja Vu, where she compares, side-by-side, two instances of unwanted sexual attention, one as a child sleeping over at a friend's and another as a young adult. That one, like many of them, uses very creative story-telling techniques and makes maximum use of her drawing talents. These aren't illustrated stories but truly a graphic memoir, where the pictures tell the story. Often funny, sometimes thought-provoking, and always intimate, Layers is a truly unique, though very relatable, memoir that uses the graphic form perfectly.

144 pages, First Second

This book fits in the following 2023 Reading Challenges:

 

Nonfiction November - Published in 2023

Travel the World in Books - France

 

Print and e-book from Amazon.

 

You can buy the book through Bookshop.org, where your purchase will support the indie bookstore of your choice (or all indie bookstores)--the convenience of shopping online while still buying local!

 
  

Dreamer: Growing Up Black in the World of Hockey by Akim Aliu (co-written by Greg Anderson Elysee and illustrated by Karen de la Vega) is another coming-of-age graphic memoir with an international flavor but quite different. Akim was a professional hockey player in the NHL who here tells the story of the terrible racism he faced, from youth hockey all the way up to the pros. Akim's mother is Ukrainian and his father is Nigerian, and when he and his brother were children, they lived in both countries. As a biracial couple, his parents found prejudice and racism in both places--even from family members--so they moved the family to Canada, hoping to provide a better life for their sons. Life was generally better in Canada, but Akim and his brother were still often the only Black kids in their school or neighborhood. Akim fell in love with hockey from the first moment he saw it, and when his parents got him some used skates at a yard sale, they discovered he was a natural. He loved the sport and was very good at it. So good, in fact, that he qualified for an elite teen league in Canada. At age sixteen, he moved to a town four hours away from his family to live with a host family and play hockey. He eventually went pro and joined the NHL, but Akim encountered horrific, often violent racism at every step of his journey--from teammates, spectators, and most alarmingly, sometimes his own coaches. As dark as this story is, there's a happy ending because Akim started a foundation, the Hockey Diversity Alliance, and has dedicated his life to making hockey, the sport he loves, more inclusive and to stamping out racism on the ice and off. The way that he turned his pain around to help other kids is truly inspiring.

120 pages, Graphix (Scholastic)

If you want to know more, as I did, here's a short interview with Akim Aliu about his experiences and his important work.

This book fits in the following 2023 Reading Challenges:

 

Mount TBR Challenge

Nonfiction November - Sport

Diversity Challenge

Travel the World in Books - Canada (several different provinces)

 

Print and e-book from Amazon.

 

You can buy the book through Bookshop.org, where your purchase will support the indie bookstore of your choice (or all indie bookstores)--the convenience of shopping online while still buying local!

  
  

It's Monday 11/27! What Are You Reading?

Hosted by The Book Date

Life

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone in the U.S! I hope you enjoyed a nice holiday. We drove to Rochester, NY, my hometown, for a whirlwind long weekend of family gatherings, covering every branch of my extended family! We stayed with my step-mom, spent Thanksgiving with my mom's side of the family, met for lunch with my aunts and cousins on my dad's side Friday, and saw a wide range of family and friends at an outdoor cabin party on Saturday.

My family on Thanksgiving

With my aunts and cousins

My husband & I with family members we don't get to see often!

My sons (and I) playing cards with their Grandma

It was great to see everyone, though my health is still very up and down. A second nap in between dinner and dessert helped me manage Thanksgiving, I rested as much as possible in between events, and my husband and I left early when we needed to. I am very grateful I was able to get to every gathering and catch up with everyone.

In fact, I actually made it to my 40th high school reunion Friday night!! My illness often doesn't make logical sense, and I don't usually have any control over it, but I actually felt good Friday evening and had so much fun! It was a blast reminiscing and catching up with old friends. In fact, many of the people there I had not only gone to high school with but also elementary school, so we'd known each other since we were five or six years old--so many funny stories and fun memories! And I learned that one of my classmates, Karen Odden, has written a series of historical mysteries.

Some of my friends at the reunion

 

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On the Blog

On this travel week, I only had time to schedule one quick post:

My Book on Sale Through Monday - an announcement of my Black Friday sale - all e-book formats and the paperback from Amazon are still on sale through tonight (and insider tip: while most of the e-book formats will revert to normal pricing at midnight, it'll probably take Amazon a day or two to update my prices). And Bookshop has reduced prices and free shipping today!

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On Video

The Booktube Watching Tag - all about my YouTube viewing habits 

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 What We're Reading

 I'm enjoying Nonfiction November!

 

 

I finally finished reading The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman, a book I've been meaning to read since its release in 2007. Wow, what a stunning book! It's the true story of a husband and wife who ran a zoo in Warsaw, Poland, when Germany invaded and saved hundreds of people from the Nazis during WWII. The author used a lot of primary sources like diaries and letters, and it is a very moving, powerful narrative. The horrors of the Holocaust are even more shocking when described by people who were there, in the thick of it. And the bravery, compassion, and strength of the people in the resistance is truly inspiring. Part of the reason it took me a while to finish the book is that I kept picking up my iPad to look things up; it's that kind of fascinating nonfiction that makes you want to learn more.

 

 

 

I am now reading We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby, a collection of essays. I've been hearing about Irby for years, and my husband gave me this one for my birthday. She doesn't pull any punches! Her essays are honest, poignant, and funny. Some are on topics I can't really relate to, like dating in the modern world, but other topics are universal. And I was surprised to learn that she also has a chronic immune disorder, Crohn's. It's not a focus of her writing here, but as with any chronic illness, it's an integral part of her life, so it affects everything. I'm enjoying the book.

 

 

 

On audio, I am listening to The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World by Melinda Gates. I hadn't seen the subtitle, so I thought this book was another inspiration/self-help kind of book, like her first. I was surprised to find that it's all about her charitable work. I'm about halfway through, and it is both fascinating and inspiring. Her work mostly focuses on the lives of girls and women, here in the U.S. and around the world, with a special focus on availability of birth control and education, two aspects that she learned had a profound effect on women and on their communities. She includes lots of stories about girls and women all over the world (which is pretty eye-opening), as well as data and research and how her foundation tries to help. It's excellent so far.

 

 

 

My husband, Ken, finished reading The Last Ranger by Peter Heller. He said it was quite different from Heller's previous outdoor thrillers (Celine, The River, and The Guide), but he enjoyed it. Now, he has moved onto another birthday gift, Holly by Stephen King. I want to read both of these!

 

 

Our son, 29, didn't have much reading time this weekend, but he is fortunate to be able to read in the car, so he finished re-reading book 3, Hero of the Ages, of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series. And now, he has moved onto the main event: Sanderson's just-published The Sunlit Man, which takes place in the same Cosmere universe. For his birthday last year, I signed him up for Sanderson's big Kickstarter, and this was the fourth book he received. It's a gorgeous embossed hardcover, and he's happy to be immersed in this world again.

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What Are You Reading Monday is hosted by Kathryn at Book Date, so head over and check out her blog and join the Monday fun! You can also participate in a kid/teen/YA version hosted by Unleashing Readers.

You can follow me on Twitter at @SueBookByBook or on Facebook on my blog's page.  

What are you and your family reading this week?