My Animals and Other Family

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My Animals and Other Family

My Animals and Other Family

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Price: £9.9
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George discovered that by seasoning a series of unpalatable facts with a sprig of zoology and a sprinkle of completely irrelevant detail, he could get me interested. Thus I became conversant with some historical data which, to the best of my knowledge, have never been recorded before. Breathlessly, history lesson by history lesson, I followed Hannibal’s progress over the Alps. His reason for attempting such a feat, and what he intended to do on the other side, were details that scarcely worried me. No, my interest in what I considered to be a very badly planned expedition lay in the fact that I knew the name of each and every elephant . I also knew that Hannibal had appointed a special man not only to feed and look after the elephants, but to give them hot-water bottles when the weather got cold . This interesting fact seems to have escaped most serious historians...The lectures were attended by Gerry, his dog Roger, Achilles the tortoise and Quasimodo the pigeon. The four musketeers doted on the juicy big grapes of Corfu. Achilles loved the wild strawberries the best though. Disappointingly, I didn't get much of an idea of the personalities of the animals Clare grew up with - this book is really just about Clare. Margo, whose interests centre exclusively around her well-being and looks, and (of course!) the young men who wander into her sphere of attraction;

This book achieves the best things about autobiography by not pushing you through every last 'comic incident' of the writer's life, but by guiding you through what was important and notable to them as they grew up. Strawberry pink, to be exact. The colour of the first house the Durrells rented on Corfu. The villa had an air of pink-faced determination. This book is the first in Gerald Durrell’s Corfu trilogy. It’s a memoir of his time as a youngster spent on that enchanting Greek island along with his mother and siblings. It highlights his love for wildlife, his affinity with the natural world. We get a glimpse of this conservationist and writer’s first encounters with the animals he grew to cherish and protect on a professional level. He tells his story with clarity and humor. His family gets mixed up in the stories along the way, and this just added to the charm of the book. I love the way he explains his intentions in the introduction:

I remember finding a box of Gerald Durrell stories on the shelf as a twelve year old and reading them in luxury. They captivated me as Durrell told the story of his childhood in Corfu hunting animals. Not only was it full of interesting facts about the animals he caught but also about the people in his life. Told with wit, humour and the pure ability of a natural storyteller this is a sort of autobiography that you can read as a novel full to the brim with short stories. The author's personification of animals extends to goats, whose "udders swing like bagpipes" and also in respect of some tortoise-shagging (the tortoises with each other, not any deviant behaviour on Durrell's part). I should like to pay a special tribute to my mother, to whom this book is dedicated. Like a gentle, enthusiastic, and understanding Noah, she has steered her vessel full of strange progeny through the stormy seas of life with great skill, always faced with the possibility of mutiny, always surrounded by the dangerous shoals of overdraft and extravagance, never being sure that her navigation would be approved by the crew, but certain that she would be blamed for anything that went wrong.” I also giggled as the ‘magenpies’ – the name Spiro gives to magpies - destroyed Larry’s manuscript; and again when a snake-filled bathtub sent Leslie streaking into the midst of a party with only a small towel for covering. In fact, I hooted aloud so often that my own dogs would watch me with rapt attention, perplexed by my sudden outbursts. Through the eager ministrations of a larger-than-life taxi-driver Spiro (Omid Djalili), who himself has a soft spot for Mother, the family move to a succession of different coloured villas.

I laughed at so many of the personal anecdotes, savored the beautiful descriptions of the island, and was entertained by his interactions with many of the island locals. The encounter with the Rose-beetle Man (what a fantastic figure this man must have been!), a meeting with a convict let out for a temporary jaunt, and the appointments with various tutors (including one with quite the impressive bird collection) all pointed to the fact that Gerry lived quite an extraordinary young life. I expected to be amused by and pleased with this story, but what I found to be a pleasant surprise was that Gerald Durrell could really write! I didn’t just highlight the funny stuff (although there are loads of those bits marked up too), but passages like this one left me gaga over his choice of words: My Family and Other Animals (1956) is an autobiographical book by British naturalist Gerald Durrell. It tells in an exaggerated and sometimes fictionalised way of the years that he lived as a child with his siblings and widowed mother on the Greek island of Corfu between 1935 and 1939. It describes the life of the Durrell family in a humorous manner, and explores the fauna of the island. It is the first and most well-known of Durrell's Corfu trilogy, which also includes Birds, Beasts, and Relatives (1969) and The Garden of the Gods (1978). My Family and Other Animals is a 1987 British TV mini-series produced by the BBC and directed by Peter Barber-Fleming. [1] [2] It is based on Gerald Durrell's autobiographical book by the same name, My Family and Other Animals, which tells about the time his family spent on the Greek Island of Corfu in 1935–1939. [2] The series consists of 10 episodes and was aired for the first time between 17 October and 19 December 1987. [1] Plot [ edit ] Clare gallops joyously through her rather eccentric life, basing each chapter on a beloved dog or horse from the period being described.... She graduates from a plump Thelwell-type Shetland pony called Valkyrie, to gymkhana ponies, and finally on to racing the thoroughbreds trained by her father, who's a famous horse trainer. Throughout this journey we are immersed in her deep love of animals,sharing her pleasure in a life rich in dogs, horses and riding.Picture Margot kissing the relic of the Saint and Mother frantically gesturing her not to, because of the germs. Margot‘s constant battle with acne, the numerous creams to try and get rid of the problem. The book ends when Clare is 19, and I dearly hope writes another - I'd love to read the same deftly-handled, brilliantly written approach to her broadcasting career. Gerald si ritrova a contatto con una natura incontaminata dove può esercitare la sua grande passione, ossia quella di scovare animali di ogni tipo e osservare il loro comportamento. Mother, obsessed with herbs and cooking, who loves her family unconditionally with all their eccentricities.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
  • Sold by: Fruugo

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