RaveThe San Francisco ChronicleWith its biblical allusions, cuddly characters and well-covered historical subject matter, The Zookeeper's Wife might have been a gamble, had anyone else but Diane Ackerman tackled it. Not surprisingly, the writer who brought us A Natural History of the Senses succeeds not only in averting these pitfalls but also in using them to her advantage, crafting a fresh and compelling addition to Holocaust literature … Ackerman is known for her love of digression, sometimes slipping in anecdotes of questionable relevance, but here she succeeds in dovetailing research on a number of seemingly dissimilar topics, keeping readers equally hungry for more on the fauna-smitten Zabinski family, the quirks of their animal charges and the clandestine inner workings of German-occupied Warsaw.
