A Zoo in my Luggage is the story of naturalist Gerald Durrell's second animal-collecting venture to what were then called the British Cameroons. It is now an independent nation called Cameroon. The story is an excellent one, full of adventure and humour, and detailed and highly engaging tales of capturing animals and socializing with the natives.

The most memorable part of the book is not the animals, but the local headman, the Fon of Bafut. Readers of Durrell will remember the Fon from an earlier book The Bafut Beagles. The ruler of this area of north-west Cameroon is a wonderful figure. Did you know that much of our common knowledge about the Fon has been gleaned from Durrell's portraits of him? This Fon was named Achirimbi II. He was tall; erect of bearing, clad usually in yellow robes and a skull-cap, generally holding tight to a endless glass of scotch, and he is an aficianado of dancing, women, and booze. He had dozens of wives. He is a fascinating character, whose appearances in the book brighten the story immeasurably. There are Fons of Bafut to this day, although they wield less power, and act mainly as local magistrates and administrators under the central government of Cameroon.

Durrell's fame is at least partially because he excels at anthropomophizing the animals he collects. He gives them names, he describes the animals in hilarious anecdotes, and attributes to them quite human characteristics. In this book there are no lack of funny animals to delight the reader.

The book would have received five stars had it not been for the timely, but intolerable way of speaking of native Cameroonians? Camerooners? Google tells me that Cameroonian is the correct demonym. There is also something left to be desired in the unethical way in which Durrell simply marched in and captured wildlife. I do realize that this was the common way of speaking and acting in 1957, but it is off-putting.

The narrator, Rupert Degas, is excellent, and he does voices incredibly well. ( )

This is the first in The Zoo Memoirs Trilogy by Gerald Durrell, originally published in 1960. The follow-up to A Zoo in My Luggage is “The Whispering Land”. I’m not sure if the publisher, Open Road Media, has thrown in another book as a selling point for it to be a Trilogy, but the third book is called “Menagerie Manor”.

Gerald Durrell (1925 - 1995) was born in India and grew up loving to study wildlife. His writing is very easy and his stories of the animals they collected over the years are quite humorous. I was just a little put off and couldn’t quite understand his use of native African dialogue at times.

You will find a photo of him, at age 10, all dressed up in his exploration garb at the back of the book, along with 13 other photos of himself throughout his life’s work.

He was a British naturalist, and I would say a writer and a little bit of an artist as well, whose main goal was to educate the people so they would have a better understanding and care for wild and nearly extinct animals. He had gathered animals in Bafut, Camaroon, Africa, before for other zoo owners, but now he wanted his own zoo. So, he headed back to Bafut with his wife, along with his secretary, Sophie, and another naturalist, Bob, and they stayed at the Fon of Bafut’s place, while he paid the local native hunters to gather wild and rare animals, birds, insects, and rodents. He accepted only about 10% of what they found, the rest were let lose back into the wild. He also paid the local native children daily to go out and hunt for snails, birds’ eggs, beetle larvae, grasshoppers, spiders, rats, etc…to feed his growing menagerie, which was around 250 by the time they left Africa and headed home with “a zoo in their luggage”.

The trials and hardships of them dealing with all of these animals makes for a great story. All of the thought that had to go into the daily feedings and cleanings, and the preparation for them to travel back to Bournemouth, England, with all those animals was quite remarkable. He had no place to put the animals so temporarily set them up in his sister’s backyard. He would later, in a stroke of luck, find the perfect place in Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands. Today, there is a bronze statue of Durrell that stands at the entrance to the Jersey Zoo, now called Durrell Wildlife Park. ( )

¿Cómo se comienza a formar un zoológico? A costa suya, pero para nuestra diversiión, Gerald Durrell ha encontrado las engorrosas, complicadas y divertidísimas respuestas a tan insólita pregunta. En estas paginas nos describe con su habitual y cálido entusiasmo, las bufonadas de los animales y las singularidades de los hombres.

My least favorite of the Durrell books. ( )

I enjoyed this nonfiction book but don't think it was quite as good as some of the other Gerald Durrell books I have read. Maybe I should have read it rather than listening to the audiobook... ( )