Gerald Durrell Hardback - 1999

When the much-loved Gerald Durrell died aged seventy in 1995, he left behind not only his bestselling My Family and Other Animals and A Zoo in My Luggage, but also the legacy of the zoo he'd dreamed of as a small boy, where he pioneered the captive breeding of animals for conservation. With the authorization of Gerald Durrell's widow, Lee, and his surviving family, biographer Douglas Botting traces the life of the world-famous naturalist and popular author of over thirty-seven bestsellers. Brother of the famous novelist Lawrence Durrell, the younger Durrell always saw his writings about his eccentric family in Imperial India or on the idyllic island of Corfu and his early interest in birds and beasts as the means of financing his great passion: the breeding of endangered species for their return to the wild. Like Jacques Cousteau, he traveled across the globe, bringing the exotic natural world closer to ordinary people, and presented a dozen different television documentary series on zoology, such as Catch Me a Colobus and Ark on the Move, which gave him an international audience. As he traces Durrell's growing menagerie of tapirs, angwantibos, gorillas, lemurs, tamarins, and Chumley the chimp, Botting brings to life the man Sir David Attenborough called "a pioneer with a marvelous sense of humor." "[Botting's] admiration and affection for his subject are infectious" - Sunday Times (London)