RaveThe Wall Street JournalThe River of Consciousness reveals Sacks as a gleeful polymath and an inveterate seeker of meaning in the mold of Darwin and his other scientific heroes Sigmund Freud and William James ... Storytelling, Sacks tells us in the essay The Creative Self, is one of our 'primary human activities.' As this volume reminds us, in losing Sacks we lost a gifted and generous storyteller.
Isobel Charman
MixedThe Wall Street JournalMs. Charman divides her tale into seven chapters, each devoted to a person associated with the zoo. What links the chapters is a growing awareness on the part of her subjects that the zoo’s animals behave surprisingly like humans ... Many of the book’s details come from her imagination, not the historical record. In an 'author’s note' she acknowledges inventing the thoughts, daily activities and words of her protagonists, including Tommy the chimpanzee. She justifies her choice by explaining that she wanted to write a “fleshed out” and 'narrative' account. But many writers of history manage do this without fictionalizing their subject ... As The Zoo engagingly shows us, caring for and observing caged beasts transformed our view of animals—and of ourselves.
Dava Sobel
RaveThe Wall Street JournalMs. Sobel writes with an eye for a telling detail and an ear for an elegant turn of phrase. In a single sentence she captures how the women both maternally nurtured and intellectually dominated their male colleagues ... Ms. Sobel’s book [is] a joy to read.
