My Family and Other Animals
As a self-described "champion of small uglies," Gerald Durrell (1925-1995) devoted his life to writing and the preservation of wildlife, from the Mauritius pink pigeon to the Rodriques fruit bat. My Family and Other Animals was intended to embrace the natural history of the Greek island of Corfu,...
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As a self-described "champion of small uglies," Gerald Durrell (1925-1995) devoted his life to writing and the preservation of wildlife, from the Mauritius pink pigeon to the Rodriques fruit bat. My Family and Other Animals was intended to embrace the natural history of the Greek island of Corfu, but ended up as a delightful account of his family's experiences that were, according to him, "rather like living in one of the more flamboyant and slapstick comic operas". As a 10-year-old boy, Gerry left England for Corfu with "all those items that I thought necessary to relieve the tedium of a long journey: four books on natural history, a butterfly net, a dog, and a jam-jar full of caterpillars all in imminent danger of turning into chrysalids". Durrell's descriptions of his family and its many eccentric hangers-on (he stresses that "all the anecdotes about the island and the islanders are absolutely true") are highly entertaining, as is the procession of toads, scorpions, geckos, ladybugs, glowworms, octopuses, the puppies Widdle and Puke, and the Magenpies. This is a lovely book. --Christine Buttery
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Format: hardcover
ISBN:
9780755111978 (0755111974)
Publish date: April 28th 2003
Publisher: House of Stratus
Pages no: 400
Edition language: English
If I have to describe this book with one word, it would be delightful. Gerald Durrell´s anecdotes about his family and their life on Corfu are funny, cozy and heartwarming. And even though I suspect that not everything has been as shiny and happy as it has been described in this book, this doesn´t t...
I absolutely LOVE it when I read a book and immediately want to find everything that author has ever written and binge read the heck out of their work. I saw a commercial for a new ITV program called The Durrells which intrigued me...especially when I learned it was adapted from a book. I threw it o...
The cover of my Penguin edition calls this a "autobiographical novel" and at the end I was left wondering how much of the book was true and how much of it was fictionalised. I came away from it feeling like it was truth exaggerated for comic effect and after some googling about the author, that see...
Al seguito di Gerry e della sua bizzarra famiglia, sono andata a Corfù. C'è tutto il tempo per godere del paesaggio, per ammirare la bellezza della natura. E c'è il tempo per conoscere, fra un animale e l'altro, i componenti della famiglia Durrell: la signora Durrell, Margo unica figlia femmina, i f...
It's really a collection of amazing anecdotes, as memorized by a slightly strange child, but I'm ok with that. The stories are incredibly funny, and very telling of animal and human nature. Durrell seemed a very democratic child, so the liberal use of the word "peasants", even when the label really ...
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