Gerald Durrell

All Durrell fans will want to own this captivating and deeply moving but surprisingly (for an authorized book) candid biography. It offers a rounded portrait of all sides of the man-naturalist, animal lover, champion of conservation, prolific author, zoo founder, bon vivant, documentary filmmaker, poet, broadcaster, explorer, marathon globetrotter. Getting past the public persona of the charming, modest, resolute, jovial guru, British writer Botting (Humboldt and the Cosmos) reveals a very different Gerald Durrell (1925-1995)--an astute, cunning, sometimes overbearing political animal; an alcoholic who mixed booze and tranquilizers; a visionary whose seemingly hopeless self-appointed mission to save the world's endangered species drove him to despair, sporadic rage and misanthropy, costing him his privacy, peace of mind, health and first marriage. Durrell's zoo, which he founded on the English isle of Jersey in 1959, pioneered the captive breeding of animals threatened with extinction, with the aim of reintroducing them to their native habitats. In some ways Jersey recapitulated his boyhood idyll on the Greek island of Corfu, where Durrell (born in India) had moved from London with his bohemian family in 1935 at the age of 10. Botting, who had exclusive access to the Durrell family archives and to Durrell's voluminous private papers, fills this uninhibited biography with hitherto unpublished autobiographical sketches, letters and diary excerpts; with wonderful stories of animals and people; with a perceptive account of Durrell's relationships with his two wives and his novelist brother, Lawrence, who sparked his interest in writing. Though critical of Durrell at times, this extraordinary saga remains true to the adventurous spirit of Durrell's writings, capturing a dynamo beset by a gnawing fear that his life's work had been in vain. Photos. Agent, Andrew Hawson at John Johnson. (Nov.)