Gerald Durrell
The Authorized Biography
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- USD 8.99
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- USD 8.99
Publisher Description
This edition does not include illustrations.
The authorised biography of the great naturalist and conservationist Gerald Durrell, who died aged seventy in January 1995 in Jersey, where he founded the zoo he’d dreamed of as a small boy and pioneered the captive breeding of animals for conservation.
Gerald Durrell was a world-famous naturalist and popular author who wrote, in all, some thirty-seven immensely readable yarns, including the bestselling ‘My Family and Other Animals’. His other books include ‘Birds, Beasts and Relatives’, ‘The Bafut Beagles’ and ‘A Zoo in My Luggage’.
Above all, he paved the way in print for the popular presentation of the natural world on television and presented twelve series himself – the early ones, of his own expeditions. Sir David Attenborough has said: ‘He was responsible for changing people’s attitudes to zoology and changing their agenda. He showed them small animals could be as interesting as apes and elephants…He was a pioneer with a marvellous sense of humour.’
His brother was the famous writer Lawrence Durrell.
About the author
Douglas Botting’s biography of GAVIN MAXWELL was hugely praised. His previous books reflect his interest in travel, exploration and wild places. He was an exploration film-maker for the BBC’s ‘World About Us’ and became a full-time writer with the publication of his highly praised biography of the German explorer-naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, Humboldt and the Cosmos.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
All Durrell fans will want to own this captivating and deeply moving but surprisingly (for an authorized book) candid biography. It offers a rounded portrait of all sides of the man-naturalist, animal lover, champion of conservation, prolific author, zoo founder, bon vivant, documentary filmmaker, poet, broadcaster, explorer, marathon globetrotter. Getting past the public persona of the charming, modest, resolute, jovial guru, British writer Botting (Humboldt and the Cosmos) reveals a very different Gerald Durrell (1925-1995)--an astute, cunning, sometimes overbearing political animal; an alcoholic who mixed booze and tranquilizers; a visionary whose seemingly hopeless self-appointed mission to save the world's endangered species drove him to despair, sporadic rage and misanthropy, costing him his privacy, peace of mind, health and first marriage. Durrell's zoo, which he founded on the English isle of Jersey in 1959, pioneered the captive breeding of animals threatened with extinction, with the aim of reintroducing them to their native habitats. In some ways Jersey recapitulated his boyhood idyll on the Greek island of Corfu, where Durrell (born in India) had moved from London with his bohemian family in 1935 at the age of 10. Botting, who had exclusive access to the Durrell family archives and to Durrell's voluminous private papers, fills this uninhibited biography with hitherto unpublished autobiographical sketches, letters and diary excerpts; with wonderful stories of animals and people; with a perceptive account of Durrell's relationships with his two wives and his novelist brother, Lawrence, who sparked his interest in writing. Though critical of Durrell at times, this extraordinary saga remains true to the adventurous spirit of Durrell's writings, capturing a dynamo beset by a gnawing fear that his life's work had been in vain. Photos.
