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.

Life of Pi By Yann Martel

Very, very good. It started slow, and I actually wonder if it would be even stronger as a short story, but still I like it as a novel.

Like Family: Growing Up in Other People’s Houses: A Memoir By Paula McLain

Very interesting, and also very sad. This is the true story of a girl and her two sisters, one older and one younger, who were abandoned by their parents. They lived with their grandmother for a short time, but then she turned them over to the state. They then grew up in foster families, where they were never really anything other than outsiders and sometimes abused. Only when they were adults did their mother come back into their lives, and they found out she’d remarried and had a whole other life without them, but they reconciled anyway.

This book was depressing because I ached that these girls did not have love from family growing up. They did have each other, though, and it seems that is the only way they emotionally survived.

Life: The Odds: And How to Improve Them By Gregory Baer

An amusing simple read. It goes over the odds of things - good and bad - happening in your life, like marrying royalty or succeeding in starting a business or dying from various deaths. Around the middle, I started getting bored and skimmed over some of the chapters. Some of them were quite fascinating though.

Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson

Funny and enjoyable. I enjoyed his writings of his wanderings.

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson

Loved it. I do enjoy his books. This describes his attempt to hike the Appalachian Trail (he doesn't hike all of it, but he certainly hikes a large chunk). This book was fun to read.

Scoot Over, Skinny: The Fat Nonfiction Anthology by Donna Jarrell and Ira Sukrungruang

Meh. I had such high hopes for these fat/fat acceptance books, and they all came highly recommended, but none of them met my expectations. This one was no exception.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.

Loved it! I love apocalyptic stories, though, so I'm an easy target for this book. Still, it was excellent.

Stick Figure by Lori Gottlieb

Interesting.

Body Wars: Making Peace with Women's Bodies, an Activist's Guide by Margo Maine

Meh. Didn't really do anything for me.

Stick Figure: A Personal Journey Through Anorexia and Bulimia by Christine Fontana

Pretty good. It was an interesting world to read about.

Bodies out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression by Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco

Meh. A couple of the essays were pretty good, but most were boring at best.

Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions by Neil Gaiman

Some hits, some misses. Overall a good read. I have yet to try his graphic novels (I know, I'm a bad fan), but his novels are more to my taste than his short stories. Still, there were some good ones.

Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch

Interesting. So obvious (to others, anyway). Giving it a try.

The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank by David Plotz

Very interesting. I'd read the author's articles on slate.com about the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank and found them interesting, so when he wrote about his book I added it to my wish list. I never gave sperm banks much thought, so it was interesting reading about this particular twist on a world I knew nothing about. It was interesting to read about what happened to a few of the kids, and how they did when meeting the sperm donors, who were not Nobel Prize winners (no kids were born from the Nobel donors).

It was just... interesting.