A review by tbr_the_unconquered
Adventures of a Young Naturalist: The Zoo Quest Expeditions by David Attenborough

3.0

A part of my childhood was about being smitten with Steve Irwin and his ilk of nature/wildlife conservationists and their television shows. To a child whose only window to the wide, vast world of wildlife outside his home town, these guys were nothing short of heroes. I had never seen a man wrestle a salt water croc or wrangle a rattle snake or capture an anaconda before I saw these and this stuff just blew me away. Every time I sat down in front of the TV it was - Attaboy Steve, let’s wrestle the living daylights out of that croc ! Back then, these reptiles were always the big baddies of the animal world for me but that phase passed and I came to understand an animal for what it is than to give it an anthropomorphic definition of good or bad. Many an animal is as petrified of a human being as we are of it and once this truth dawned on me, these shows lost their charm. While all of this was going on, I also occasionally watched TV shows where a mild mannered British gentleman walked through deserts, swamps, jungles and caves and introduced us to the amazing flora and fauna that lay within it without ever disturbing the animals. This was how David Attenborough and his amazing shows came into my life and have stayed on for all this while. What always stuck me was how much the man respected nature and how his presence was welcomed even by animals who were very shifty about the presence of a human being.

The book is a collection of Attenborough’s chronicles of the years he spent collecting animals for the London Zoo in varied ecosystems across the World. This whole program was televised by BBC as ‘Zoo Quest’ and in the course of three broad chapters Attenborough gives us the behind the scenes look at some of his assignments. There is his travel to the Amazon basin to observe, film and bring back birds, his trip to Indonesia to find the Orangutan, a trip to Komodo to find the Dragon and finally to Bolivia to find the Pangolin. This is written in classic Attenborough style with a dry wit and infectious curiosity about the natural world. Interestingly enough I read this in Attenborough’s own voice, it was like a recorder played on inside my head that read the book out loud in his voice.

All things said, this is not a great book for the simple reason it is not material enough for a book. The contents could easily have made a great behind the scenes documentary but considering that the events in this book happened in the 1950’s, there was no additional camera crew filming it all. There is so much more I wanted to write on Sir David but I’ll reserve that for another book on/by/about him.

Not the best to know the man but still a good attempt.