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| The Rarest of the Rare: Vanishing Animals, Timeless Worlds | 
| Author: Diane Ackerman
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $12.95
Buy New: $5.74
You Save: $7.21 (56%)
New (26) from $5.74
Avg. Customer Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 502150
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 208
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.6
ISBN: 0679776230
Dewey Decimal Number: 578.68
EAN: 9780679776239
ASIN: 0679776230
Publication Date: January 14, 1997
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 1-5 of 9 | | NEXT » |
 Endangered Species and Ecosystems May 21, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
"As we float down the river, we occasionally smell smoke in the air. Though we are miles away from the sites, we are smelling the devastation of the rain forest, smelling the burning of huge tracts of forest. If the destruction continues at its current pace, all of the rain forest will disappear forever in about forty years." ~ pg. 39
"The Rarest of the Rare" is a fascinating account of Diane Ackerman's thoughts on endangered species and ecosystems. I loved the stories of the Golden Lion Tamarins and how they are being reintroduced into the Amazon rain forest.
Whether Diane Ackerman is swimming with monk seals, tagging butterflies or watching pink dolphins she seems equally at home in nature. She somehow manages to transport the reader to each location by painting descriptions in vivid detail. While the descriptions usually focus on the beauty of the locations, the reader is not spared when it comes to the realities of the cruelty in nature.
In these rare and exotic lands animals must still fight for survival. Diane Ackerman is also a survivor. In this book she tells the story of how she broke three ribs after trying to climb down sheer cliffs on Torishima, a volcanic island. As an adventurer she takes certain risks to get her stories and they all turn out wonderfully in the end. Of all her books, I think this is my favorite.
~The Rebecca Review
 The poetry of extinction November 27, 2007
Diane Ackerman is a gifted poet-naturalist and brings both strengths to her reportage of the wild world. This volume examines a few of the world's endangered species and ecosystems, and the people who are struggling to save them. From the Amazonian rain forest to a Japanese volcanic island to a Hawaiian coral atoll to the Florida scrub lands, Ackerman hopscotches around the globe armed with curiosity and wonder. Nor is it ever far from her mind that there is contradiction in her journeying: She a member of the species and culture that is doing most of the undoing she explores, and even her travel and presence a part of the unraveling of the web. Yet, if there is any hope of saving pieces of the puzzle which supports the earth's current diversity (and, of course, our sweet selves), it probably lies in convincing enough humans that the stakes are enormous. Ackerman is a very convincing reporter. With her you can become entranced with the flight of the short-tailed albatross, so perfectly adapted to the wind that it can fly for months (possibly years) without flapping its wings, or leap through the trees with Golden Lion Tamarinds in Brazil's coastal forests. Her descriptions are gloriously rich in texture and tone, scent and nuance, and she dives right in to the work; banding monarch butterflies, tagging monk seals, and rapelling hazardous cliffs to count nesting birds (which resulted in three seriously broken author-ribs). As I notedd in my review of Ackerman's best-selling A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SENSES (Vintage Books, 1991), that volume offered "a delicious jacuzzi-soak in each of the five nerve groupings we call smell, touch, taste, hearing and sight." Here she does it again.
Grand Adventures! June 12, 2005
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Diane Ackerman writes with such eloquence. This book was such an enjoyable read, it is easy to forget that it deals with tough environmental issues. The author has collected short stories from many of her travels to various places to witness endangered species first-hand. From the rain forest to a remote island in Japan, she blends the story of her trip with information about the endangered species/habitat and the interesting people she meets along the way. She manages to get us to think about our impact on nature without being preachy, and in an entertaining manner. A must for any adventurer, actual or armchair.
beautiful journey July 7, 2004
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
Diane Ackerman takes us on a journey from continent to continent exploring the habitat of several rare animals, including the golden lion tamarind, short-tailed albatross, and monk seal. In every case, Ackerman doesn't just observe, she gets right up close, in some cases risking or sustaining injury. She catches crickets, tags seal pups, and presses bombardier beetles to see them spray a warning. (All this is done under the eyes of experts in the various fields.) Her descriptions of the habitats are, as usual, beautiful but real enough so that you are transported right into these remote locations with her. By simply describing the work of those who study and handle the animals, Ackerman reminds us how important it is to preserve what's left of their habitats, always worth emphasizing.
Collection of essays on endangered species March 3, 2004
21 out of 21 found this review helpful
I want Diane Ackerman's life. She gets to visit weird, remote, exotic locations, observe unusual flora and fauna, write about them - and earns enough money to go out and do it again.
In The Rarest of the Rare, she gathers together 6 essays previously published elsewhere; all deal with endangered species such as the golden lion tamarind, the monarchs, monk seals, and others. But she's not just a do-gooder naturalist: she's also a poet, a philosopher, and a heck of a good writer. Some of her musings, the questions she asks of herself, the parallels she makes, remind me of Annie Dillard's nature writing - her books such as Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
It's a joy to share these things that I will never experience through the eyes of such a consummate scientist and writer and human being.
Also, for an entirely different approach to observing endangered species, see Daniel Glick's Monkey Dancing.
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Wildlife, nature and the Environment
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