Bhamini Ravishankar's Blog - Posts Tagged "animals"

My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Today is the 30th of June. The day Greece is supposed to default on its debt. While the country is in news for all the wrong reasons, book-lovers ought to ignore doomsday-prophecies of the stodgy monetary sort and pick up this utterly enthralling, humorous and compassionate page-turner that portrays a Greece of a different kind.

Gerald Durrell is ten when his eccentric family comprising his mother and elder siblings Larry, Leslie and Margo decide to move to the Greek island of Corfu to escape the inclement English weather. Their adventures there for the next five years, including riotous accounts of the people they meet (Spiro Hakiapoulos, taxi-driver and majordomo rolled in one; Dr. Theodore Stephanides, mate to little Gerald's natural-history-crazy soul; the bird-crazy Kralefsky - to mention only a few), as well as the endless cavalcade of pets that call the shots in the harum-scarum household make for an unputdownable read.

The affectionate and moving detail with which every bird, leaf, beast, fish and flower have been described in "My Family and other Animals" ought to make us step out of our human-centric world and begin acknowledging that there's more to this planet than meets our myopic eyes.



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