Ngày đăng : 07/11/2008

Alex and Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence--and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process (Sources: Booklist and Publishers Weekly)


Pepperberg, Irene (author).

Nov. 2008. 240p. HarperCollins, hardcover, $23.95 (9780061672477).

 

Alex, an African gray parrot, died suddenly in his 30s and was mourned the world over. Pepperberg, Alex’s owner and researcher, limns the importance of Alex’s life and her work with him on the subjects of intelligence, cognition, and language. Pepperberg started her academic career pursuing a doctorate in chemistry, but she changed her focus to animal communication. Choosing to work with an African gray, due to their reputations as clear talkers, the author had the pet store choose a bird for her so that the choice would be random. The result was Alex, a parrot that would forever change the way science looked at the cognitive abilities of birds. In this highly readable, anecdotal book, Pepperberg describes the training techniques she and her assistants used with Alex, the breakthroughs he made, and his growing fame as word began to spread about the brainy parrot who could differentiate colors, count, and describe objects accurately and in human language. The flip side of Alex’s fame was the resistance Pepperberg faced from the entrenched scientific community.

— Nancy Bent

(Source: Booklist)

 

Atwood's book is a weird but wonderful mélange of personal reminiscences, literary walkabout, moral preachment, timely political argument, economic history and theological query, all bound together with wry wit and careful though casual-seeming research. "Every debt comes with a date on which payment is due," Atwood observes on this conversational stroll, from the homely and familiar "notion of fairness" and "notion of equivalent values" in Kingsley's Water Babies to the thornier connection between debt and sin, memory and redemption in Aeschylus's Eumenides. "Any debt involves a story line," Atwood points out as she leads the reader into "the nineteenth century [when] debt as plot really rages through the fictional pages," and ruin is financial for men, but sexual for women. Things get even darker on "the shadow side" where "the nastier forms of debt and credit"-debtors' prisons, loan sharks and rebellions-abide. Atwood is encyclopedic in her range, following threads wherever they lead-credit cards and computer programs, Sin Eaters, Saint Nicholas, Star Trek, the history of pawnshops and of taxation, Elmore Leonard's Get Shorty and Dante's Divine Comedy, Christ and Faust-and a consistently captivating storyteller.

(Source: Publishers Weekly)



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