Babylon's Ark: The Incredible Wartime Rescue of the Baghdad Zoo by Lawrence Anthony

Excellent. I found out about Babylon's Ark from a story last weekend on CBS Sunday Morning about Mr. Anthony and what he did for the Baghdad Zoo, and I just had to read it. It is indeed a moving book. Paragraph to paragraph I was alternately horrified at the cruelty of humanity and moved to tears by the kindness of humanity.

It begins when Mr. Anthony is watching the U.S. bomb Baghdad before taking it. He owns and lives at a game preserve in South Africa, and man who loves animals, and knows that wartime is particularly cruel to animals in zoos, as they are completely abandoned to die horrible deaths from starvation or thirst. He knows he can't do much about the war, but he can - hopefully - help the animals. So with some outright lies, stretching of the truth, and luck, he manages to get to Baghdad just after the American troops. He gets to the zoo and finds it in worse shape than he expected. Nevertheless, he gets to work, doing all he can to save the animals that remain (most having been taken by looters for food or sale on the black market).

The time sequence in the book isn't clear - he discusses events at various places in time - but it seems like what he did takes a year or more. However, the whole thing, from the time he arrived in Baghdad until the zoo opened once again to the public with healthy animals, was a mere 4 months. It is amazing all that took place in those four months. Six weeks after the zoo opened, he returned home to South Africa, the zoo fully in the hands of the Iraqis.

In the final chapter of the book, the author steps out of the tale of his experience and onto a soapbox. Though I agree with much of his perspective (that we humans are currently poor stewards of the Earth), it was kind of annoying and I skimmed through that chapter rather than read it. Still, it is a minor flaw in an otherwise excellent book simply because it is easy to skip, and also because I feel hard-pressed to chastise him for taking the chance to rant on his soapbox after what he did and saw in Baghdad.

So definitely read this book.