Gorilla Tactics
How to Save a Species
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- £11.99
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
Gorillas are among the most recognizable of the large charismatic mammals, but climate change and poaching has brought them to the brink of extinction.
Greg Cummings was the executive director of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund for seventeen years. He shares his fascinating experiences as a "wildlife Robin Hood"—raising money from the rich and famous and redistributing it to endangered gorillas and their habitats.
He met and enlisted the help of celebrities such as Sigourney Weaver, Arthur C. Clark, Douglas Adams, and Leonardo DiCaprio. This thirty-year worldwide journey moves from boardrooms in Manhattan and London to mountain treks in Rwanda and Congo.
Gorilla Tactics is sure to enchant readers with Greg's unique experiences, while sharing insight into the work it takes to save a species from extinction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cummings, the former director of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund U.K., debuts with a boastful memoir about how his superior salesmanship has helped raise money for gorilla conservation. In his early 20s, Cummings was working as a bartender in London when a bar patron involved with a children's charity helped him land a fundraising job. Discovering he had a knack for the work, Cummings left the charity after a year to become the executive director of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund U.K., which bankrolls anti-poaching patrols and studies of Rwanda's endangered mountain gorillas. Cummings indulges in frequent name-dropping, as when he goes on a lengthy tangent about a formative experience meeting Arthur C. Clarke as a child while discussing how the sci-fi author later helped the Fund convince NASA to photograph the gorillas' habitat from space. The granular accounts of Cummings's fundraising efforts are tedious and self-congratulatory ("I made it rain grants"), and readers will wish he spent more time on his reverent recollections of photographing and studying gorillas in the wild. Additionally, Cummings has an unfortunate penchant for distasteful phrasing (he refers to the Rwandan genocide as "Star Wars in Africa"). This disappoints.
