The Rarest of the Rare: Vanishing Animals, Timeless Worlds Paperback - 1997

First line

In daydreams I have seen its face: a bulbous head covered in silvery fur, with black buttonhook-shaped eyes, a snout on which springy nostrils open full like quotation marks, tiny tab-shaped ears, a spray of cat's whiskers, and many doughy chins.

From the jacket flap

Ackerman journeys in search of monarch butterflies and short-tailed albatrosses, monk seals and golden lion tamarin monkeys: the world's rarest creatures and their vanishing habitats. She delivers a rapturous celebration of other species that is also a warning to our own. Traveling from the Amazon rain forest to a forbidding island off the coast of Japan, enduring everything from broken ribs to a beating by an irate seal, Ackerman reveals her subjects in all their splendid particularity. She shows us how they feed, mate, and migrate. She eavesdrops on their class and courtship dances. She pays tribute to the men and women hwo have deoted their lives to saving them.

Media reviews

"A life-changing excursion, pleasing, and provocative to mind, body, and soul."--San Francisco Chronicle


"This reader was left wondering which was more impressive, Ms. Ackerman's meticulous prose or her intrepid spirit."--New York Times Book Review


"A work to savor...Ackerman brings to her work a poetic sensitivity that enchants while it informs...entrancing."--Philadelphia Inquirer

Citations

• New York Times, 02/16/1997, Page 32
• Publishers Weekly, 12/30/1996, Page 0