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Jun 07, 2017tjdickey rated this title 3.5 out of 5 stars
An excellent and true story about saving human lives and saving animal lives, told by a poet. Her prose runs to sensual details, and lengthy and evocative lists ("autumn laced the air with a stitchery of migrating songbirds and chevrons of blaring geese"), and the narrative delves deeply into the sounds, and smells, and emotional character of the "Noah's ark" that the Zabinskis made of the Warsaw zoo during the Nazi occupation. Ackerman even plumbs philosophical questions about human and animal nature, both Nazi ideology which could boast of ecological awareness and simultaneously seek to destroy parts of the planet's genome, and questions of how humans and animals can live interlocking and symbiotic lives.