Confessions Of An Accidental Zoo Curator

From cougars, orangutans, supersize snakes, fugitive pigs, and a shocked New York City cabbie, Confessions is fascinating, and often hilarious. Berkovits masterfully regales readers with stories that give the inside scoop on what went on behind the scenes at one of the world's most famous zoos with facts that read like fiction! Her tales will surprise and enlighten. A must read for all animal lovers and those interested in the future of wildlife. ..".a remarkable story, fascinating and unique...with a deft blend of personal insight and eloquent story-telling, Berkovits takes us from a remote village in Kyrgyzstan to the Bronx Zoo... from neophyte to international leader in her field." -William Conway, former President of the Wildlife Conservation Society and Director of the Bronx Zoo ..".a story that goes far beyond its title. Berkovits goes from a difficult childhood devoid of any real animal connections, to become one of the world's foremost leaders in wildlife conservation education... fascinating and inspiring." - Alan Rabinowitz PhD, Zoologist, Author, CEO Panthera

This book situates zoos as trusted cultural institutions with valuable affordances for engaging people in natural resource conservation.

Despite their centrality to the operation of contemporary accredited zoo and aquarium institutions, the work of zoo veterinarians has rarely been the focus of a critical analysis in the social science and humanities. Drawing on in-depth interviews and observations of zoo and aquarium veterinarians, mainly in Europe and North America, this book highlights the recent transformation that has occurred in the zoo veterinarian profession during a time of ecological crisis, and what these changes can teach us about our rapidly changing planet. Zoo vets, Braverman instructs us with a wink, have "gone wild." Originally an individual welfare-centered profession, these experts are increasingly concerned with the sustainability of wild animal populations and with ecological health. The story of zoo vets going wild—in their subjects of care, their motivations, and their ethical standards, as well as in their professional practices and scientific techniques—is also a story about zoo animals gone wild, wild animals encroaching the zoo, and, more generally, a wild world that is becoming "zoo-ified." Such transformations have challenged existing veterinary standards and practices. Exploring the regulatory landscape that governs the work of zoo and aquarium veterinarians, Braverman traverses the gap between the hard and soft sciences and between humans and nonhumans. At the intersection of animal studies, socio-legal studies, and science and technology studies, this book will appeal not only to those interested in zoos and in animal welfare, but also to scholars in the posthumanities.

A searing portrayal of a mother's anguish over the sudden hemorrhagic stroke of her son--devoted father of two young girls--rendering him a quadriplegic in the prime of his life. An intimate glimpse of a world shattered by stroke, in which each poem not only illuminates but reimagines life with hope and acceptance. Any parent who has watched a beloved child struggle with a medical disaster, or suffering intractable drug dependency will easily recognize and relate to the sadness, grief, guilt, the struggle to understand, and to help when one is often helpless. Through a succinct poetic exploration, readers will be heartened by the promise of survival, the faith in science, the mystery of the human body and, most of all, the courage that a gravely disabled child can bestow upon a parent.

Out of Control chronicles the dawn of a new era in which the machines and systems that drive our economy are so complex and autonomous as to be indistinguishable from living things.

Annette Libeskind Berkovits thought her attempt to have her father record his life's story failed. But in 2004, three years after her father's death, she was going through his things and found a box of tapes--several years' worth--with his spectacular life, triumphs, and tragedies told one last time in his baritone voice. Nachman Libeskind's remarkable story is an odyssey through crucial events of the twentieth century. With an unshakable will and a few drops of luck, he survives a pre-war Polish prison; witnesses the 1939 Nazi invasion of Lodz and narrowly escapes; is imprisoned in a brutal Soviet gulag where he helps his fellow inmates survive, and upon regaining his freedom treks to the foothills of the Himalayas, where he finds and nearly loses the love of his life. Later, the crushing communist regime and a lingering postwar anti-Semitism in Poland drive Nachman and his young family to Israel, where he faces a new form of discrimination. Then, defiantly, Nachman turns a pocketful of change into a new life in New York City, where a heartbreaking promise leads to his unlikely success as a modernist painter that inspires others to pursue their dreams. With just a box of tapes, Annette Libeskind Berkovits tells more than her father's story: she builds an uncommon family saga and reimagines a turbulent past. In the process she uncovers a stubborn optimism that flourished in the unlikeliest of places.

The fictionalized account about the enthralling life during WWII of the mother of Daniel Libeskind and his sister Annette Libeskind Berkovits.

A critical history of site-specific art since the late 1960s. Site-specific art emerged in the late 1960s in reaction to the growing commodification of art and the prevailing ideals of art's autonomy and universality. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as site-specific art intersected with land art, process art, performance art, conceptual art, installation art, institutional critique, community-based art, and public art, its creators insisted on the inseparability of the work and its context. In recent years, however, the presumption of unrepeatability and immobility encapsulated in Richard Serra's famous dictum "to remove the work is to destroy the work" is being challenged by new models of site specificity and changes in institutional and market forces. One Place after Another offers a critical history of site-specific art since the late 1960s and a theoretical framework for examining the rhetoric of aesthetic vanguardism and political progressivism associated with its many permutations. Informed by urban theory, postmodernist criticism in art and architecture, and debates concerning identity politics and the public sphere, the book addresses the siting of art as more than an artistic problem. It examines site specificity as a complex cipher of the unstable relationship between location and identity in the era of late capitalism. The book addresses the work of, among others, John Ahearn, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Donald Judd, Renee Green, Suzanne Lacy, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Richard Serra, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Fred Wilson.