Re-Reading Grotowski

A special issue of TDR: The Drama Review on Jerzy Grotowski

Guest-Edited by Kris Salata & Lisa Wolford Wylam
MIT Press Journals, May 2008
Publication was made possible, in part, through a grant from the Polish Cultural Institute in New York.

This important issue of TDR: The Drama Review includes previously unpublished material by Jerzy Grotowski, plus articles on theatre companies and artists who preceded and have followed in the footsteps of the great Polish theatre artist.

Grotowski viewed the first translated text, Reply to Stanislavsky, as one of his most important. In it he systematically addresses matters of continuity between the line of theatrical research initiated by Stanislavsky and his own. The second text by Grotowski, On the Genesis of Apocalypsis, is one of several texts that Grotowski wished to be included in a revised and expanded edition of Towards a Poor Theatre.

Zbigniew Osinski, considered to be the most significant Polish scholar of Grotowski's work, has written about a critical influence of the aesthetics, vision, and ethos of Reduta – Poland’s first laboratory theatre founded by Juliusz Osterwa, on Grotowski and his Laboratory Theatre in The Heritage of the Reduta Theatre in Grotowski and the Laboratory Theatre.. This material fills a crucial gap not only in Grotowski studies but in theatre studies more generally, as at present English-language readers lack access to any information about Reduta and its founder. The issue also features a translation of Acta Gnosis by Antonio Attisani, an article on non-representational acting from Grotowski to Thomas Richards by Grotowski translator Kris Salata, and articles by Mario Biagini, Kris Salata and Lisa Wolford Wylam.

Cunningham, Grotowski, and Beckett have several things in common; small means, intense work, rigorous discipline, absolute precision. Also, almost as a condition, they are theatres for an elite – Peter Brook

POZA: On the Polishness of Polish Contemporary Art

by Krzysztof Wodiczko, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Anna Bella Geiger, Dominik Lejman and other artists, edited by Marek Bartelik

Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT, April 2008
Published through a grant from the Polish Cultural Institute in New York

POZA presents a selection of both well-established and emergent Polish artists, resident not only in Poland but also in the United States, Canada, France, and Brazil. These artists are proposed not as mere instances of a nationality, but as individuals who explore issues of national identity by casting them in the broader context of contemporary art and life. These issues include questions of the ethnic versus the national, gender identity in post-Communist Poland and the nomadism of contemporary artists. The artists featured are Kinga Araya, Azorro Group, Frida Baranek, Anna Bialobroda, Karolina Bregula, Anna Bella Geiger, Wojciech Gilewicz, Aneta Grzeszykowska & Jan Smaga, Ewa Harabasz, Joanna Hoffmann, Jerzy Kubina, Zofia Kulik, Dominik Lejman, Joanna Malinowska, Jacek Malinowski, Gabriela Morawetz, Adam Niklewicz, Karol Radziszewski, Krystiana Robb-Narbutt, Christian Tomaszewski, Maciej Toporowicz, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Monika Weiss, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Pawel Wojtasik, Xawery Wolski and Krzysztof Zarebski.

The Polish word “poza” has a double meaning: “pose” or “posturing” (as one disguises his or her true nature for public display), and “beyond” or “besides”.

The book is a result of the exhibition POZA(Real Art Ways Major Multidisciplinary Exhibition 2006-2007). Curated by the Polish-born and New York based art critic and art historian Marek Bartelik, POZA gathered together works of 31 artists with roots directly or indirectly in Poland. The artists represent different generations – the oldest born in the 1930s, the youngest in the early 1980s. Works in the exhibition included painting, sculpture, photography, new media, video and site-specific installations and performances at Real Art Ways, as well as public projects located around Hartford and surrounding towns.

>>> MORE ON THE EXHIBITION

The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changes the Course of World War II

by Andrew Nagorski

Simon & Schuster, September 2007

Using secret documents and eyewitness testimony, much of which contradicts the sanitized version of events presented by Soviet and even Western writers, Nagorski tells the full story of this epic battle for the first time. Far less known than the battle for Stalingrad , which involved about half the number of troops, the battle for Moscow was the biggest in history. From the time Hitler launched his assault on Moscow on September 30, 1941, to April 20, 1942 , seven million troops were engaged in this titanic struggle. The combined losses of both sides – those killed, taken prisoner or severely wounded – were 2.5 million, of which nearly 2 million were on the Soviet side.

Hitler was so overconfident – even though his generals warned him – that the German army went into battle in the Russian fall well armed but with no winter clothes. Stalin was so in denial that the majority of Russian soldiers had no weapons. As German troops approached Moscow, half of the city's population fled, while others looted stores, staged strikes and attacked those who were escaping. In the end, the German drive fell short, but Stalin's regime was so embarrassed by how close they came, by the mistakes the Soviet dictator had made that allowed them to do so, and by the behavior of many of its own citizens, that the battle -- which lasted almost seven months -- was given short shrift in their history books.

But Nagorski has given us, in sometimes harrowing detail, an account of the bloody, narrow victory that marked the beginning of the end for Hitler's war machine. He also takes the reader behind the scenes of the early negotiations between Hitler and Stalin, and of those later on between Roosevelt, Churchill, and a very wily Stalin.

This highly readable, intellectually stimulating – and at the same time very moving – record of the fearful experiences of nations and individuals stands out as one of our time's finest war books. Not only the mass dying, but also the profound self-deceits of Hitler, of Stalin – and of high-level Westerners – are brought together in this large-scale horror epic. – Robert Conquest, author of The Great Terror

Andrew Nagorski has written a gripping story of a strangely underappreciated event that profoundly shaped our world. Nagorski's morally acute, forceful, grimly enlightening account, enriched by interviews with surviving participants, is an urgent reminder of the totalitarian nightmare from which we in the blessed West only narrowly escaped. – Richard Bernstein, former Berlin bureau chief of The New York Times and author of Fragile Glory: A Portrait of France and the French

Written with a genuine feel for the individual dimensions of warfare and compassion for the suffering of both the victors and the vanquished. – Zbigniew Brzezinski, author of Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower

Award-winning journalist Andrew Nagorski is a senior editor at Newsweek International. Previously the Newsweek bureau chief in Hong Kong, Moscow, Rome, Bonn, Warsaw and Berlin, he is the author of several books and has written for many publications. For more information on the author, upcoming book signings, and reviews, please check www.andrewnagorski.com

Who Will Write Our History?: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (The Helen and Martin Schwartz Lectures in Jewish Studies)

by Samuel D. Kassow

Indiana University Press, July 2007

In 1940, the historian Emanuel Ringelblum established a clandestine organization, code-named Oyneg Shabes, in Nazi-occupied Warsaw to study and document all facets of Jewish life in wartime Poland and to compile an archive that would preserve its history for posterity. As the Final Solution unfolded, this group – though decimated by murders and deportations – persevered in its work until the spring of 1943. Of its more than 60 members, only three survived. Ringelblum and his family perished in March, 1944. But before he died, he managed to hide thousands of documents in milk cans and tin boxes. Searchers found two of these buried caches in 1946 and 1950.

Who Will Write Our History? tells the gripping story of Ringelblum and his determination to use historical scholarship and the collection of documents to resist Nazi oppression.

A stunning revelation of the enduring spirit of the decimated residents of the Warsaw Ghetto. – Rita Kohn, NUVO Weekly, August 8, 2007

The volume provides important insights into the nature of why people [...] create and maintain historical documents. – Reading Archive, September 2007

Samuel D. Kassow is the Charles Northam Professor of History at Trinity College. He is author of Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia, 1884-1917 and editor (with Edith W. Clowes) of Between Tsar and People: The Search for a Public Identity in Tsarist Russia. He lives in Hartford, Connecticut.

Polish artist Monika Sosnowska makes works with space and about space, so that space becomes an experience, and attributes such as "narrow" or "wide," "closed" or "open," "low" or "high" are experienced sensuously and emotionally.

The catalogue was published on the occasion of the ‘Loop’ exhibition in the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein in Vaduz, February 16 - May 6, 2007

In her installations, which echo the formal language of the constructivist avant-garde, the minimal and conceptual tendencies of the 60s and the 70s, as well as the heritage of modernist architecture, Monika Sosnowska constructs a physical and conceptual labyrinth, a post-narrative, inner world of spatiality, staged in a sequence of interventions that emphasize space’s virtualities and potentials. Here, in this complex and powerful investigation of our spatial perception, a particular surgery is being applied to a body of space and its cultural articulation, architecture. Space and its parameters – size, dimensions, scale, plans, topology – are being altered, shifted, and possibly confused and manipulated in order to generate a very unique, unusual experience of spatial habitat and to sharpen our perception of it, outside of our common reality and its habits. With her intimate geometry, Sosnowska experiments with our senses and emotions, making us aware of psychosomatic, hidden qualities of space, which in her highly performative installations are personified and animated. Between Kafkaesque oppression and a desire to liberate space, there is a sublime and uncanny spatial environment, rendered – sometimes very playfully – on the edge between dream-like imagery and everyday familiar experience.

Sosnowska’s monumental architectural intervention, Loop, developed specially for the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein in Vaduz in a collaboration with one of the architects of the museum building, Christian Kerez – as a flexible but controlled space with a deconstructive twist and its unusual processing of memory – is an attempt to confront modernist, universalized patterns and to escape the given dimensions in a radical act of constructing a subjective space, a sensual, partly oneiric, mental shell of contemplation and desire. Welcome to a seance of phenomenological spatio-therapy!

Monika Sosnowska was born in 1972 in Ryki, Poland. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, and currently she lives and works in Warsaw. Her recent exhibitions include shows at MoMA, New York; Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne; Freud Museum Vienna; Serpentine Gallery London; De Appel, Amsterdam. Sosnowska participated in Manifesta 4 (Frankfurt), 8th Istanbul Biennale, Venice Biennale 2003. She also represented Poland at the Venice Biennale 2007.

Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski translated by Klara Glowczewska Knopf, June 2007 From the master of literary reportage, who died in January of 2007, and whose acclaimed books include Shah of Shahs, The Emperor, and The Shadow of the Sun, this is his last book, published posthumously in English – an intimate account of his first youthful forays beyond the Iron Curtain. Just out of university in 1955, Kapuscinski told his editor that he’d like to go abroad. Dreaming no farther than Czechoslovakia, the young reporter found himself sent to India. Captivated, he discovered his life’s work – to understand and describe the world in all its multiplicity. From the rituals of sunrise at Persepolis to the incongruity of Louis Armstrong performing before a stone-faced crowd in Khartoum, Kapuscinski gives us the non-Western world as he first saw it, through still-virginal Western eyes. His traveling companion was a copy of the 5th-century B.C. Histories by Herodotus, a gift from his boss. Whether in China, Poland, Iran, or the Congo, the “father of history” – and, as Kapuscinski would realize, of globalism – helped the young correspondent make sense of events and find stories where none was obvious. It was his great forerunner’s spirit – both supremely worldly and innately Occidental – that continued to whet Kapuscinski’s ravenous appetite for the wider world. Travels with Herodotus is a work of art: so eloquent, so simple, that you find yourself marveling at its prose… And you find yourself applauding such good translation as well. The deeper, tacit message in Travels with Herodotus is surely that journalism now, with its celebrity roving correspondents who jet in and out of conflicts, misses the point. [...] Kapuscinski will be remembered for a kind of writing and a standard seldom present in the reportage we read today; just as he will be remembered for a humility, a selflessness, that touched every word he wrote.                                                    – Tahir Shah, The Washington Post's Book World, 2007 Kapucinski saw more, and more clearly, than nearly any writer one can think to name. Few have written more beautifully of unspeakable things. Few have had his courage, almost none his talent. His books changed the way many of us think about nonfiction... When the last page of this book is turned, note how much smaller and colder the world now seems with Kapuscinski gone. – Tom Bissell, New York Times Book Review Kapuscinski fashions an elegant homage to his literary ancestor, whom he helps us to see as the original foreign correspondent. Educated by the atrocities of his own time, he refuses to let Herodotus’s ancient atrocities become distant and abstract. – Adam Kirsch, The New York Sun In this dramatic telling by one of modernity’s ablest chroniclers, Herodotus stands for democracy, openness, and tolerance. The same can be said of the equally enigmatic, and certain to be missed, author.        – Lawrence Osborne, Men’s Vogue Personally revealing, Kapuscinski is not often didactic and never triumphalist. His luminous narratives are filled with odd juxtapositions and the ambiguities of real experience. Like Herodotus, Ryszard Kapucinski was a reporter, an historian, an adventurer and, truly, an artist. – Matthew Kaminski, The Wall Street Journal Ryszard Kapuscinski, Poland’s most celebrated foreign correspondent, was born in 1932 in Pinsk (in what is now Belarus) and spent four decades reporting on Asia, Latin America, and Africa. He is the author of Shah of Shahs, The Emperor, Another Day of Life, and The Soccer War. His books have been translated into twenty-eight languages. Kapuscinski died in 2007. >>>MORE Klara Glowczewska, one of the most distinguished translators of Polish books into English, including several by Kapuscinski, is Editor-in-Chief of Condé Nast Traveler

Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?: 23 Questions from Great Philosophers by Leszek Kolakowski translated by Agnieszka Kolakowska Basic Books, November 2007 A tour of Western thought by one of the world's most eminent philosophers – in a book that fits in the palm of your hand. Can nature make us happy? How can we know anything? What is justice? Why is there evil in the world? What is the source of truth? Is it possible for God not to exist? Can we really believe what we see? There are questions that have intrigued the world's great thinkers over the ages, which still touch a chord in all of us today. They are questions that can teach us about the way we live, work, relate to each other and see the world. Here Leszek Kolakowski explores the essence of these ideas, introducing figures from Socrates to Thomas Aquinas, Descartes to Nietzsche, and concentrating on one single important philosophical question from each of them. Whether reflecting on good and evil, truth and beauty, faith and the soul, or free will and consciousness, Leszek Kolakowski shows that these timeless ideas remain at the very core of our existence. Leszek Kolakowski is currently senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He has also taught at the University of Chicago, McGill University, UC Berkeley, and Yale University. He is the author of numerous books, including his masterpiece and magnum opus Main Currents of Marxism, published in three volumes in the 1970s and recently reissued in a single volume by Norton. His writings provided the philosophical underpinnings of the democratic opposition in Poland that led to the rise of Solidarity and the fall of Communism. He is the recipient of many major international awards, including the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society (2007), the Library of Congress John W. Kluge Prize in the Human Sciences awarded for lifetime achievement in the humanistic and social sciences (2004), a MacArthur ("genius") Fellowship (1983) as well as the German Booksellers Peace Prize (1977), the Erasmus Prize (1980) and the Veillon Foundation European Prize for the Essay (1980). He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a fellow of the Académie Universelle des Cultures, and a Foreign Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He lives in Oxford, England. For more, click HERE

POLIN: STUDIES IN POLISH JEWRY, VOLUME 19 Polish-Jewish Relations in North America edited by Mieczyslaw B. Biskupski and Antony Polonsky Littman Library of Jewish Civilization (January 2007) Poland today is a very different country from Poland of the past, yet attitudes inherited from the past continue to affect Polish-Jewish relations in the present. In Poland itself, now a free society, memories of the Jewish place in Poland’s history, long suppressed by communism, are being re-evaluated. In America the attitudes that divided the two sides in the Old Country seemed for a long time to be becoming more entrenched. This volume, probably the first comprehensive study of Polish-Jewish relations in North America, explores how this situation came about, and also considers the efforts being made to put the resentments caused by past conflicts to one side as the influences long dominant in the Polish-Jewish relationship in North America begin to lose their formative power. The contributors deal boldly with matters at the heart of the relationship. There is an attempt to quantify the attitudes of both sides to a number of key aspects of the Holocaust, and fascinating questions are raised about how the Holocaust has distorted the perceptions that Poles and Jews have of each other, and why the Holocaust remains a problem in Polish-Jewish relations. Stereotyping is confronted head-on. There is an investigation of how crude stereotypes of Polish peasants have found their way into Jewish history textbooks, crucially affecting the disposition of American Jews towards Poland, and of how the stereotyped world of the shtetl still haunts the American Jewish imagination, with great consequences for the attitude to Poles and Polish Americans. The way in which this stereotype is challenged by realities encountered in the March of the Living is provocatively discussed, along with the options for dealing with a landscape “poor in Jews, but rich in Jewish ruins”. A number of chapters describe attempts to overcome mutual stereotyping, including a detailed and valuable account of the National Polish-American Jewish-American Council, and of the attempts that have been made to steer the Jedwabne debate in a constructive direction. These small beginnings show that it is possible to go beyond past differences and to concentrate instead on what has linked Poles and Jews in their long history. As in earlier volumes of Polin, substantial space is given, in “New Views”, to recent research in other areas of Polish-Jewish studies. Contributors: Karen Auerbach, Mieczyslaw B. Biskupski, Stanislaus A. Blejwas, Alina Cala, Robert Cherry, Toby W. Clyman, David Engel, Danusha V. Goska, Andrzej Kapiszewski, Jonathan Krasner, Sarunas Liekis, Karen Majewski, Ewa Morawska, David Patterson, Gunnar S. Paulsson, John T. Pawlikowski, Antony Polonsky, Tomasz Potworowski, Laura Quercioli Mincer, John Radzilowski, Anna Petrov Ronell, Rona Sheramy, Daniel Stone, Adam Teller, Jerzy Tomaszewski, Carla Tonini, Maja Trochimczyk, Stephen J. Whitfield, Marek Wierzbicki Mieczyslaw B. Biskupski holds the S. A. Blejwas Endowed Chair in Polish History at Central Connecticut State University, and is the author, among other books, of The History of Poland, Ideology, Politics and Diplomacy in East Central Europe, Polish Democratic Thought, and Poland and Europe: Historical Dimension. Antony Polonsky is holder of the Albert Abramson Chair of Holocaust Studies, a joint appointment held in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC, and has been editor-in-chief of Polin since its inception.

Andrzej Wajda: History, Politics, and Nostalgia in Polish Cinema
by Janina Falkowska
Berghahn Books, December 2006

The work of Andrzej Wajda, one of the world’s most important filmmakers, shows remarkable cohesion in spite of the wide-ranging scope of his films, as this impressive study of his complete output of feature films shows. Not only do his films address crucial historical, social and political issues; the complexity of his work is reinforced by the incorporation of the elements of major film and art movements such as Socialist Realism, Italian Neo-realism, the documentary tradition, French New Wave, Surrealism, the grotesque, the theatre of the absurd, film propaganda, the Polish Romantic tradition, and many other artistic phenomena (jazz, Polish student subculture, etc.). It is the remarkable reworking of all these different elements by Wajda, as the author skillfully shows, which gives his films their unique visual and aural qualities.

Janina Falkowska is Professor in the Film Studies Department at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada, specializing in East-Central European and Western European cinemas. Her publications include The Political Films of Andrzej Wajda (Berghahn Books 1996), National Cinemas in Postwar East-Central Europe (ed.), and, co-authored with Marek Haltof, The New Polish Cinema (Flicks Books 2003).

They Called Me Mayer July. Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust
Mayer Kirshenblatt and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
University of California Press, September 2007

Intimate, humorous, and refreshingly candid, this extraordinary work is a remarkable record – in both words and images – of Jewish life in a Polish town before World War II as seen through the eyes of an inquisitive boy. Mayer Kirshenblatt, who was born in 1916 and left Poland for Canada in 1934, taught himself to paint at age 73. Since then, he has made it his mission to remember the world of his childhood in living color, "lest future generations know more about how Jews died than how they lived." This volume presents his lively paintings woven together with a marvelous narrative created from interviews that took place over forty years between Mayer and his daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Together, father and daughter draw readers into a lost world – we roam the streets and courtyards of the town of Apt, witness details of daily life, and meet those who lived and worked there: the pregnant hunchback, who stood under the wedding canopy just hours before giving birth; the khayder teacher caught in bed with the drummer's wife; the cobbler's son, who was dressed in white pajamas all his life to fool the angel of death; the corpse that was shaved; and the couple who held a "black wedding" in the cemetery during a cholera epidemic. This moving collaboration – a unique blend of memoir, oral history, and artistic interpretation – is at once a labor of love, a tribute to a distinctive imagination, and a brilliant portrait of life in one Jewish home town.     Copub: The Judah L. Magnes Museum

This collection of pre-Holocaust memories will be a lasting contribution to our understanding of Eastern European Jewish life and culture before its destruction.
                                   – Publishers Weekly

It is best through personal stories that we can grasp the world of our fathers which the Nazis destroyed. Mayer Kirshenblatt has a unique gift for evocation of the past in his simple and beautiful paintings. Each one tells a story. Together they make up a world.
                                  – Jan T. Gross, author of Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland

Mayer Kirshenblatt brings to life the small Polish town of Apt prior to 1934. We see before our eyes the world of Polish Jewry, from the well-dressed kleptomaniac who steals live fish to Kirshenblatt's mother in her kitchen. His paintings are simple, direct, often witty, and always moving. A book to buy, a book to share.
                                  – Sander L. Gilman, author of Multiculturalism and the Jews

As if memory itself had come and lifted up his brush, Mayer Kirshenblatt evokes every aspect of his childhood in a tender, beautiful series of paintings. The accompanying narrative mirrors the qualities of his art: a remarkable spontaneity and transparency permits the precious illusion that Apt, Poland, lives again in scenes of birth and death, recreations of kitchens and fire stations and farms, inhabited by a full and lively cast of butchers, milkmaids, prostitutes, musicians, all so lovingly and creatively brought to life. It is a magician's trick, a joyous and deeply satisfying immersion in the lost world of prewar Poland Jewry.             – Ann Kirschner, author of Sala's Gift: My Mother's Holocaust Story

Mayer Kirshenblatt is an artist living and working in Toronto. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at The Jewish Museum in New York, Koffler Gallery, and Canadian National Exhibition, as well as in an exhibition organized by the Smithsonian Institution. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies at New York University. She is the author of Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (UC Press) and Image Before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland Before the Holocaust (with Lucjan Dobroszycki) and co-editor of Art from Start to Finish and The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times.

EXHIBITION DATES:

Judah L. Magnes Museum, Berkeley, September 9, 2007 – January 13, 2008

The William Bremen Jewish Heritage Museum, Atlanta, Spring 2009

Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam

Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw, May 8 – September 27, 2009

The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

by Diane Ackerman

W. W. Norton, September 2007

Diane Ackerman, a noted writer on natural history, recounts the horrors of the German occupation of Poland in World War Two through the unusual prism of the Warsaw Zoo, where its director,Jan Zabinski, and his resourceful wife, Antonina, managed to save hundreds of Jews.

With the German invasion in 1939, Warsaw had been devastated and the zoo along with it. With most of their animals dead, the Zabinskis found a way to put their empty cages to good use. The Germans had allowed Jan to turn the zoo into a pig farm, and to enter the ghetto for food scraps for the animals. He smuggled food in and smuggled people out. One thing led to another, and while the Jews were transported to death camps, the Zabinskis hid some 300 Jews over time in sheds, animal enclosures, and even the lion house. At any given time about a dozen of these "guests" were hiding inside the Zabinskis' villa. Jan, active in the Polish resistance, kept ammunition buried in the elephant enclosure and stashed explosives in the animal hospital. Meanwhile, Antonina, with extraordinary ingenuity, courage, and even humor, kept her unusual household afloat, caring for both its human and its animal inhabitants — otters, a badger, hyena pups, lynxes. She had a unique gift, “a nearly shamanistic empathy when it came to animals.” For Antonina, animal and human formed a continuum. It is the perfect story for a writer like Diane Ackerman, with her loving grasp of natural history.