Author: dianeackerman

A Pulitzer Prize finalist: After her husband, an English professor, suffered a stroke and lost his ability to formulate spoken words, writer Diane Ackerman helped him reclaim his language in this “gorgeously engrossing, affecting, sweetly funny, and mind-opening love story” (Booklist starred review).

After their zoo was bombed, Polish zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski managed to save over three hundred people from the Nazis by hiding refugees in the empty animal cages. With animal names for these “guests,” and human names for the animals, it’s no wonder that the zoo’s code name became “The House Under a Crazy Star.” Best-selling naturalist and acclaimed storyteller Diane Ackerman combines … combines extensive research and an exuberant writing style to re-create this fascinating, true-life story–sharing Antonina’s life as “the zookeeper’s wife,” while examining the disturbing obsessions at the core of Nazism. Winner of the 2008 Orion…