Book Review: A Zoo In My Luggage

Among my favorite animal-focused authors of all time is the British naturalist Gerald Durrell.  Durrell was a prolific writer who authored several books, most of which can be divided into two categories.  There are the books he wrote about his youthful days as an animal collector, hacking his way through the forests of Africa and South America in search of mostly small, obscure beasts.  And there are the books about his later life, in which he established his own zoo on Jersey in the Channel Islands, a zoo which today bears his name.  

And then there is the book the bridges the gap, when he transitioned from one to the other.

A Zoo In My Luggage details one of Durrell's expeditions to his favorite hunting grounds of Cameroon, where he trapped animals in the domain of his good friend and the local ruler, the gin-slinging Fon of Bafut.  (I found the first chapter to be one of the more amusing ones - Durrell, already a celebrated author at this point, had written about his previous adventures in the Fon's domain, and upon his return to Cameroon, suddenly found himself worried that his friend might object to his depictions in my book.  Fortunately, the Fon had a good sense of humor and was delighted at being immortalized in literature).   Readers with more modern sensibilities may show some distaste for the concept of collecting in colonial Africa, with all of the racial undertones that are inescapable in such interactions, but Durrell's genuine appreciation for Africa and Africans - as actual people, not as stock characters - seemed clear to me (and his writing is more mature than it is in some of his earlier writing, perhaps as he became more confident and familiar with Africa)

The first portion of the book details Durrell, his (first) wife, Jackie, and their team as they collect a representative sample of Cameroonian wildlife. Unlike past expeditions, however, Durrell wasn't planning on off-loading his collection to British zoos at the end of the trip.  Instead, he decided it was time to start there own.

As Durrell himself cheerfully admits, any sane person would have found the site for a zoo first, and then built the facilities, and then, and only then, actually gone out and gotten the animals.  Durrell... did not do that.  Instead, he parked his mobile zoo in his sister's garden, and then set out to find a home for it, sure as could be that some government would be delighted to welcome him.

I've described much of the story of how Durrell eventually found a home for his animals and his family elsewhere in this blog, and it remains one of my favorite zoo stories, so no need to rehash it hear.  What I mostly remember about this book is the sense of joy in watching someone fulfill their dream, which just so happened to be a dream that I'd also shared for so long.  I don't expect to be starting up my own zoo any day now - not unless someone leaves a duffel bag of gold bars on my doorstep one morning - but I can still live vicariously through the story of a young man who loved wildlife and wanted to spend his life with animals, and who, against outrageous odds (some self-inflicted) went on to create an institution which has outlasted him as a force for good for animals all over the world.

A Zoo In My Luggage at Good Reads