I don't have too much specifically to say about this book, except that I really enjoyed it. Subtitled "The Incredible Wartime Rescue of the Baghdad Zoo," it's basically about this guy - author Lawrence Anthony - who decides that you can't just leave captive animals to die in a war zone. And he's absolutely right. As he writes (with his cowriter, I should add, just because) toward the end of the book, "Our inability to think beyond ourselves or to be able to cohabit with other life-forms in what is patently a massive collaborative quest for survival is surely a malady that pervades the human soul." At times the chronology was confusing, but overall, Babylon's Ark is just a fascinating account of one man's quest to put things to right. I totally want to go visit his game reserve, Thula Thula, in Africa now.
The only thing I have to point out, though, is the factual error about halfway through about Patton's rescue during WW2 of Austria's famed Lipizzanner horses. The book says that the horses rescued from Hostau, Czechoslovakia were shipped to the United States, but that's not true - and the only reason I know this is that I just wrote a story on a herd in Illinois. The horses were actually returned to the Austrians (hence the continuation of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna today).
Anyway, overall, two thumbs up...
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