Author: Anita Albus
Year published: 2011
The German author Anita Albus has given us a real treasure--a book that looks beautiful while informing and stimulating at the same time. Albus relates the sad, poignant tales of extinct and disappearing birds, such as the passenger pigeon, the dodo and Spix's macaw. Not to sound hippy-dippy here or anything, but I think when we lose an animal species, we become less of a race as humans. It should be up to us--the most civilized, advanced and smartest of all the animals--to help preserve and take care of animals, not destroy them.
Here's a quick review written by Michael Kerrigan and originally published at Scotsman.com.
This is a bookseller's nightmare: where is so ebulliently uncategorisable a title to be shelved? Science, art, literature, history? Wherever it is, it's a reader's delight. It's also a joy for anyone who loves fine art, fine birds or both, bringing together plates from historic painters and engravers--and, a real revelation, from Albus herself. The visual and the verbal are equally important to this German artist--but then hers is a creativity for which everything interconnects; and for which, more specifically, a crisis in conservation is a crisis in human thought. She is among authors drawn to the work of the old natural scientists and their lack of drive to compartmentalise, to separate out the sciences from the humanities, or to develop a different sense of wonder. Albus quotes poet Paul Valéry: "The more I look at you, animal, the more I become man in spirit."
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