I recently received a review copy of Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence–and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process, by Irene Pepperberg. I didn't really give it much thought until I saw that Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times listed it as one of her top 10 books of the year: "A charming portrait of Alex the gray parrot — whose linguistic and cognitive skills impressed the world, before his death in 2007 — by the scientist who worked with him for three decades".
Here's an NPR interview with Pepperberg from last month. And the Both Eyes Book Blog calls Alex & Me a "profoundly moving story" and "a more personal remembrance aimed at a popular audience."
I'd be happy to give away my copy of this book – if you're interested in reading it, leave me a comment here with your email address.
Also, for those of you who read Run for the last EDIWTB book club, you might be interested to know that today is Ann Patchett's birthday. Here's a writeup about her from The Writer's Almanac this morning:
It's the birthday of novelist Ann Patchett, born in Los Angeles (1963). She was raised in Nashville by her single mother, and she hardly ever went to school. So even though she decided at age five that she wanted to be a writer, at age seven she still didn't know how to read. But she learned, and by high school, she wrote incessantly. She said, "While my girlfriends danced and dated, I sat and wrote. Every ounce of gangly energy I had went onto paper." Her first story came out in the Paris Review on her 21st birthday. Everybody loved the story; it got anthologized over and over. But Ann Patchett got writer's block. She tried to write a novel based on the story, but it failed, and her publisher dropped her. The same year, her marriage broke up. She moved back in with her mother and waited tables at T.G.I. Friday's. She spent a year just thinking about what to write, and then she sat down and in six months she wrote her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars (1992). She went on to write Bel Canto (2001), which sold more than 1 million copies, Truth & Beauty (2004), and her most recent novel, Run (2007).